Immigration agents have arrested at least a dozen people in Santa Fe since Sunday, advocates say, stoking fear for some and bringing protests and a commitment Thursday from elected officials to strengthen policies protecting immigrants.
Federal agents followed one of those arrested, Edgar Chacon-Miranda, to La Familia Medical Center and arrested him there. His 11-year-old daughter, one of three children he provided for, was with him. Her cries were captured on bystander video.
Chacon-Miranda’s arrest at the clinic Wednesday, along with broader Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the last week, sparked a protest by about 100 people Thursday evening at the intersection in front of the Roundhouse.
Despite a broken leg, 61-year-old teacher Giselle Piburn was wheeled to the front of the protest line.
“I think it’s just horrendous they would approach a facility like La Familia,” she said. “That immediate reaction from our community is important.”
She was among those who expressed outrage at immigration authorities using “sensitive locations” for immigration enforcement.
“I’m afraid to send my kids to school — because my kids are brown, and I don’t want them to be messed with or kidnapped,” said 36-year-old Chicana woman Jazmin Lara, who works for an in-home care agency.
“I don’t want this to get like Minneapolis,” she added.
‘A matter of time’
On Thursday, state and federal elected officials joined family members and advocates at a news conference decrying the recent arrests.
“We want justice for my uncle. Please,” said Madeline Pernillo, Chacon-Miranda’s 18-year-old niece.
“It was a matter of time,” said Ivan Cornejo, chair of the city’s immigration committee who also coordinates the public school district’s Adelante program for homeless students. “We have kids who are going home without their parents. We have absences in schools. We have families who are missing out on their doctor’s appointments, who are afraid to go buy groceries to put food on the table for their families. We can’t allow this to happen.”
In an interview following the news conference, Cornejo described ways the city could strengthen its protections, including a prohibition on immigration agents staging operations on city property, including roads and some parking lots — which have been the target of at least a few arrests in recent days.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
“I’m not sure exactly where they are exactly staging, but they’re operating here,” he said. “As far as the traffic violations that we’ve been seeing, they are not just randomly picking up people from nowhere. These are families who are being spied on, and we want to know where they are setting up to do this.”
‘They have quotas’
Although the second Trump administration promised to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants a year, arrests in Santa Fe had been largely piecemeal, isolated incidents until recently: In the last few days, there have been at least a dozen arrests.
“What we know is they have quotas,” said U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat whose district includes Santa Fe. “There is no community in the United States that is safe.”
Leger Fernández pointed to legislation in the U.S. Senate and House restricting immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations” — churches, schools and clinics like La Familia, where Chacon-Miranda was arrested.
“They are places where we’re going to get healthcare. They are places where we send our kids to school, and they are places where you pray,” she said.
The Trump administration rescinded an existing rule restricting immigration enforcement in sensitive locations on its second day in office. “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson wrote at the time.
“They used to stay away under Biden. They used to stay away when it was Obama,” Leger Fernández said of the so-called sensitive locations. “It was Trump and his cruel and corrupt policies that have decided … there is no safe, good place.”
Homeland Security responds
In a statement emailed to The New Mexican on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, called Chacon-Miranda a “criminal illegal alien” whose arrest was part of a “targeted enforcement operation” and came “after officers observed him park.”
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Charges in Chacon-Miranda’s arrest record included battery against a household member, criminal sexual penetration in the second degree, child abuse and abandonment of a child, the DHS spokesperson wrote.
Those charges stem from a 2018 case and were all dropped for “Failure by Prosecutor [to] Proceed within Time Limits,” according to an online court database.
Under President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary MarkWayne Mullin, “ICE is targeting the worst of the worst,” the DHS spokesperson wrote. The spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry seeking information on the other arrests purported to have occurred in recent days.
After a reporter raised a question about the father’s charges during the news conference, Leger Fernández said she couldn’t speak for ICE but noted agents presented no warrant in any of the recent stops she had heard about. She alluded to agents engaging in racial profiling to find arrest targets.
“There was no reason to come up to some of these cars,” she said.
While some arrested over the last few days have been let go, Leger Fernández said many are still detained in New Mexico. She has demanded ICE not send detainees to other states, “somewhere far away where the family cannot reach them.”
State law complications
The arrests came without the support of state and local law enforcement, said New Mexico House Majority Leader Reena Szczepanski, a Santa Fe Democrat, as a result of the state law prohibiting such cooperation passed this last legislative session, the Immigrant Safety Act.
“That is because we have done the hard work of passing state laws as well as our city and county stepping up to ensure that they are not cooperating in immigration detention procedures,” she said.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
State lawmakers have “gotten New Mexico out of the business of detention — on paper,” she said, a nod to the same state law, which also outlawed immigrant detention in the state.
The law has done nothing to reduce the number of federal immigration detainees in New Mexico, as its implementation has been mired in a legal challenge from the U.S. government and workarounds in the contracts used by local governments, private prison companies and the federal government to keep the state’s detention centers running.
“Our Department of Justice is doing work now to ensure that these immigrant detention facilities within our state borders will close,” Szczepanski said. “Those are a few of the steps that have already been taken by your Legislature — and we will continue to do more.”
