cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/46330472
... Axel Sanchez Toledo had called 911 in December to ask the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office for a welfare check on his 4-year-old. He shared custody with his ex, and had heard his daughter was sick ...
[The deputy] accused Sanchez Toledo of being undocumented and said he was being detained for ICE, court records show.
He was shocked with a Taser gun, kicked and tackled, while his girlfriend pleaded with deputies to stop. “Please, guys, I’m not a criminal,” Sanchez Toledo moaned, insisting he had documentation — a pending asylum case, his attorney later said. “I don’t want to go.”
“Too f---ing bad now!” one deputy screamed.
“He just wanted to know about his daughter,” his girlfriend cried. “Why would you guys do this?”
The deputy who arrested Sanchez Toledo was part of the sheriff’s office’s [287(g) Task Force], an arrangement with ICE that allows local police officers to enforce federal immigration law [as bounty hunters]
Routine police interactions are leaving even some crime victims and people who call 911 for help vulnerable to detention and arrest, The Marshall Project has found.
Lured in part by federal payouts, more than 1,100 law enforcement agencies across the country have signed agreements with ICE, with the heaviest concentration in Southern states.
...
The people detained by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office include a restaurant employee reporting information on a possible burglary, a mom who reported a theft and asked for help with her son, a crime victim who was in a minor fender bender while taking his son to school, and Sanchez Toledo, who was also charged with resisting arrest.
Prosecutors promptly dismissed the charge. But Sanchez Toledo remained in the Palm Beach jail. On May 1st, ICE picked him up, and now he sits in immigration detention, awaiting the possibility of deportation. He has not talked with his daughter since December. The experience, Bonilla said, has completely transformed how Sanchez Toledo and his family view law enforcement.
“They reached out for help, and the complete opposite happened,” Bonilla said. “They’re traumatized by it all.”