Last week, a US Citizen and her legal immigrant husband were driving 
down Wendover Avenue in Greensboro when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer pulled them over with his blue light. According to the ICE officer, he was checking license plates and determined this particular car belonged to someone with an outstanding deportation order.
The immigrant man was taken into custody and held for several hours at the ICE facility at Centerpoint.
Eventually, his wife was able to convince the officers that her husband was a legal resident of the USA and he was released. The story could have turned out differently. All too often, before a family can intervene, ICE moves those they detain to centers in other states, and by the time a family even knows where their loved one is being held, they are moved again. This case turned out OK. It seems that this man had had a deportation order against him a dozen years ago, but because he actually had a legal right to be in this country, the deportation order had been dismissed. Yet, somehow, that dismissed deportation order continues to reside in the ICE computer network and is listed as an active, unserved deportation order. From now on, this honorable man will have to go through his life worried that he might be detained at any moment due to this erroneous record. If his wife is not there to intervene, he could find himself deported.
One has to wonder why the ICE officer decided to run a license check on this particular car. Did it have a Spanish language bumper sticker that caught his attention? Did it somehow fit the profile of the kind of car a potential undocumented immigrant might drive? Do ICE agents routinely patrol Greensboro streets looking for suspects to stop and question? Have we already reached the point in North Carolina that every person who could be mistaken for an immigrant must carry proof of their right to be here on their person at all times, and just hope that the ICE agents believe those papers to be legitimate? Remember the Chicago man who just two weeks ago was put into deportation because the agents thought he looked "Mexican" and so they did not believe his documents to be legitimate? He was a US Citizen, born here and with no legal reason to have to carry documents to prove he could live and work in America.
Could YOU be mistaken for an undocumented immigrant? If stopped, could you immediately prove, beyond a doubt, that you have a legitimate right to be here?
-Written by Stephen Sills
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