Evelin Josefina Perez was feeling ill when she picked up her son, Santiago Zamora Perez, from baseball practice the evening of Dec. 7. She let the 17-year-old take the wheel for the 20-minute drive home to Detroit.
As they drove through Fraser, just north of Detroit, Santiago saw a police car, panicked and slowed down. The officer pulled him over for “impeding traffic” and asked a dispatcher to call the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for “citizenship verification,” police records show.
Less than 24 hours later, Santiago and Evelin, Venezuelan asylum seekers, were booked into a federal immigration jail in Texas — the same one where two other Detroit teenagers were already being held.
The routine traffic stop could have ended with a warning. Instead, the officer turned it into an immigration issue — upending a young person’s life. But the incident was far from unusual. By handing migrants over to federal agents more often, local police are helping drive President Donald Trump’s aggressive and unpopular deportation machine, according to immigrant rights advocates.
Santiago is one of five Detroit teens arrested and jailed by federal immigration agents since mid-November.
“It was an evil thing to do,” a family relative said in Spanish. Santiago’s relative asked that their name be withheld out of fear of retaliation by immigration authorities. “I don’t know if it was racism, because (Santiago) has dark skin, or if it was some other reason, but it shouldn’t have gone that way.”
The relative spoke with Evelin and Santiago by phone. This account is based on police records and the relative’s recounting of what they were told by police.
Samantha Kretzschmar, director of the Fraser Department of Public Safety, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Fraser, a majority-white city, cast 52% of its roughly 9,000 votes for Trump in 2024.
‘Much more frequent contact’
In the past week, local law enforcement calls triggered 10 out of the 40 immigration arrests reported to the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC), spokesperson Christine Sauvé said.
“There have always been agencies that have called Border (Protection),” she said. “But under this administration, we are seeing just much more frequent contact.”
Police have no legal obligation to alert federal agents when they encounter people without legal status, Sauvé said. Some local law enforcement officials say doing so only makes their jobs harder, since it discourages migrants from reporting crimes.
A handful of Michigan police forces have made headlines for signing formal agreements with federal immigration authorities. But cooperation is far more widespread. Fraser doesn’t have a 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and it’s unclear whether the city gives officers guidance on dealing with noncitizens.
Local police departments have broad latitude to decide how to handle these interactions. Detroit Police Department policy states that officers do not enforce federal immigration laws and are not to question residents about their immigration status. The department does honor ICE requests to hold specific individuals in detention, though it is not required to do so.
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan found that local law enforcement agencies initiated nearly half of CBP arrests in Michigan between 2012 and 2019.
Officers typically explained their decision to call federal immigration agents by saying they needed help identifying a person or communicating with someone who only speaks Spanish, according to the report.
That’s what happened to Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, another Detroit student who was deported in June after Rockwood police called CBP during a May traffic stop.
The ACLU report found a pattern of racial profiling based on people’s skin color and the language they speak.
Santiago Zamora Perez’s relatives said they believe racial bias played into the decision to pull him over.
A few minutes after he left baseball practice, Santiago noticed a police car and slowed down.
Santiago doesn’t have a driver’s license. He and his mom are both asylum seekers legally seeking shelter in the U.S. from harsh conditions in Venezuela.
The officer waited for Santiago to pass, flipped on the squad car lights and pulled him over. He’d been traveling 38 mph in a 50 mph zone.
Instead of attending school the next day, Santiago was transferred along with his mother to the South Texas Family Residential Center, where they’re still being held.
Correction: The previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Evelin Josefina Perez does not have a driver’s license. Perez holds a Michigan driver’s license under a Biden-era program for Venezuelan asylum seekers. The story has been updated.
This article first appeared on Outlier Media and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
They are illegal and therefore deportable. Come in the right way and we are ok with that.
Agreed!
Randy, Asylum is a perfectly legal process. Please read a book. Not to mention being undocumented is a CIVIL offense NOT criminal.
The Fraser PD saw someone breaking the law and they did their job. That should be the narrative of the story.
Note to the author:
Mr. Levin, If you care for the hispanic community as much as you want us to believe, then perhaps you could open your home to these families and provide financial assistance to them out of your own pocket. The taxpayers are tired of doing this. Who paid the the vehicle fees? Did they have insurance? I suspect they did not. Maybe you could pay it for them.
Statistics prove that immigrants provide more funds to the US economy than they cost. ICE is funded by diverting funds from programs that would assist US citizens.
Impeding traffic is not a crime and its a very subjective civil infraction. Please read a book. Also, undocumented immigrants pay taxes and are not able to reap the benefits that citizens do. If you care about your tax money going to welfare then you should be advocating for Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch’s as they have gotten hundreds of millions of tax dollars.
We do pay police officers to enforce the law.
Why is the story being blamed on rascism?