ICE Just Tried to Deport an Indigenous Woman

On Tuesday, 24-year-old Leticia Jacobo was about to leave Polk County Jail in Iowa when ICE randomly detained and prepared to deport her. There are a lot of things wrong with that, but the biggest one is that she’s from the Arizona Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community—and this is her land. 

After serving time for allegedly driving on a suspended license, Jacobo’s mother went to pick her up, only to be told her daughter was going to be turned over to immigration agents. She then brought officers a copy of Jacobo’s birth certificate, but even that wasn’t enough to overturn her detainment. (!!??!!)

Speaking to the Arizona Mirror, Jacobo’s aunt recounted being particularly alarmed because no one at the jail seemed willing to acknowledge, or fix, the mistake. And the jail should have known who Jacobo was; she had her tribal identification; she was fingerprinted; her social security number was on file; and she’d been booked into the jail before. But when Jacobo’s family started asking questions, officers said, “Well, we don’t know because we’re not immigration and we can’t answer those questions. So when they pick her up tonight they’re going to go ahead and deport her to wherever they’re going to take her, but we have no information on that.” 

Jail staff said Jacobo would have only hours before being transferred into federal custody, so the family quickly put out calls on social media and asked tribal leaders to step in. Eventually she was released, and a lieutenant from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office called it a “human error.” “I’m sure as soon as the command staff find out about it, they’re going to have some meetings with their supervisors internally and be like, ‘Hey, guys, we gotta keep our thumb on this, this is silly,’” he said. (Hmm. Silly to me is balancing a plate on your nose, not a serious legal blunder, but OK!) 

Jacobo was detained under the jail’s 287(g) “deportation-collaboration program,” which makes local police and sheriff departments into offshoots of ICE. Through it, local prisons can conduct random detainments on anyone who has already been arrested, as a way of saving paperwork and deporting more people—and as of September, the Trump administration had gotten 1,000 state and local agencies to participate.

The ordeal highlights yet another ugly side to Trump’s campaign to carry out the largest deportation effort in American history, which has resulted in ICE detaining and imprisoning more people than its facilities can handle. (In July, the federal government allocated an additional $170 billion toward this hateful crusade.) 

Speaking to the Mirror, Jacobo’s aunt said she was skeptical the mix-up was just a misunderstanding, and that there wasn’t a little bit of discrimination involved.

According to the CATO Institute, Latino people are overrepresented in the number of people detained, making up about one in five arrests. In January, during the first week of Trump’s second presidency, the Navajo Nation told CNN that ICE had harassed at least 15 Native people in their homes and workplaces. “I think there’s a confusion with other races, maybe just because having a brown skin, automatically being profiled or stereotyped to be in a certain group of race,” a spokesperson for the group said. And in September, the Supreme Court more or less greenlit ICE agents to discriminate and treat race as grounds for detainment.

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