Marcelo Gomes da Silva should be freed
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The arrest came as part of stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Massachusetts over the past few months. The agency seems to have boosted its arrest numbers by widening its net. Of the roughly 1,500 people that Operation Patriot apprehended in Massachusetts, 790, or barely over half, had prior charges or convictions. The government's own tally implies that another estimated 710 community members had no criminal records at all.
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Among them is Gomes, an honors student from Milford who officials say was a 'collateral arrest' — their name for arrests of people who are undocumented but have no criminal records, encountered by immigration agents in the community.
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The Trump administration has argued that collateral arrests are more likely in places where local police don't cooperate with immigration authorities. If agents could just pick up criminals from courthouses or police stations, the argument goes, they wouldn't have to venture into the community where they're bound to run into other undocumented people.
But the argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny — in the Gomes case and in general.
The teenager was driving a vehicle belonging to his father, who officials say was the real target of the operation. But there is nothing publicly known that would suggest that the father was free because of anything the state of Massachusetts did, or that state officials could have turned him over to federal immigration even if they'd wanted to. Reporting by The Boston Globe found that the elder Gomes had faced traffic violations two years ago, which were later dismissed.
But even if the state of Massachusetts had failed to cooperate with the feds to detain the father, the idea that immigration agents therefore simply had no choice but to arrest 'collaterals' it encountered while looking for him is false. Immigration officers didn't have to arrest Gomes; they chose to.
If collateral arrests were really more common in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, one would expect to see fewer of them in places that do cooperate with immigration enforcement. But that doesn't seem to be the case. See Operation Tidal Wave in April, which apprehended 1,120 undocumented immigrants across Florida. Only 63 percent of those detained had prior criminal arrests or convictions.
The problem may be that arresting noncriminals could be the only way to reach the deportation numbers the Trump administration wants. The Trump administration recently imposed a new target of 3,000 arrests a day, but contrary to the president's rhetoric, there just aren't enough actual immigrant criminals to meet those numbers.
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Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration, is clinging to anecdotal and often misleading cases to justify its tactics. In a
Two of these men were 'arrested' while in custody at state prisons — where the justice system was already punishing them. A third man had been arrested by a New York police department, not federal agents. And the fourth man was a lawful permanent resident, not an 'illegal alien,' as the release claimed.
We didn't need to deeply analyze this particular press release to find these gaping errors — the Trump administration simply published information that was in direct contradiction to its own claims. It's scary that people this sloppy with the facts also have the power to make life-changing arrests.
Its high-profile blunders also include mistakenly
If there's any method to this madness, it may be that the Trump administration thinks it can use arrests of people like Gomes to pressure local governments into aiding with its immigration agenda — to raise the costs for cities and states that don't cooperate.
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But if Gomes's plight is an indictment of the Trump administration, it's also an indictment of Congress. Proposals to normalize the status of young people like Gomes have widespread support but have stalled in Congress for years. If lawmakers had acted, thousands of kids and young adults would no longer fear being deported to a country they may barely know because their parents chose to break immigration laws.
Lawmakers should get serious about protecting those young people. Meanwhile, immigration officials should focus on actual safety threats — and Gomes should be back in our community.
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