ICE Detains US Citizen for Recording Agents

An Oregon woman who is a U.S. citizen was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for about seven hours last Monday after taking pictures of agents’ unmarked cars near a Gresham Chick-fil-A.

Berenice Garcia-Hernandez, 25, snapped into action after seeing a Facebook post alerting people to the agents’ presence near the fast-food chain. The person who sounded the social-media alarm said he had been too scared to get pictures of the agents’ license plates.

So Garcia-Hernandez headed to Chick-fil-A in her fiancé’s government-plated car, ordered a lemonade at the drive-thru and took pictures of the agents’ plates herself.

“It’s very inhumane what they’re doing right now,” she said of ICE activity in general. “It’s not a crime to take pictures or videos of them.”

This is where her story and that of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security diverge.

Garcia-Hernandez declined to say where her fiancé works. Typically, however, government vehicles may be driven only by employees or authorized others on official business.

After she took the pictures, she drove off and agents followed her, she said. She said she thinks the government plates on her car may have caught their attention, so when she hit a red light agents got out of their car and approached her. That’s when one agent started recording her and refused to show her any sort of law enforcement identification, she said.

“So once the light turned green, I left,” she said.

When she hit another red light, she stopped again. That’s when the ICE agents put on their police vehicle lights to pull her over.

This time, they broke the car’s passenger side window, opened the door and got her out of the car, she said.

Eventually, they detained her, took her to the ICE facility in South Portland and told her she was in “so much trouble,” she said.

“In no way, shape or form did I ever become aggressive,” she said. “I complied the whole time. The only reason why they took a chance on following me, it’s because of the type of car that I was driving.”

It is not illegal to photograph or record ICE officers in public spaces so long as the photographer isn’t interfering in agents’ work.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said Garcia-Hernandez aggressively followed ICE vehicles in her fiancé’s work car, obstructed ICE officers and resisted arrest.

“Her reckless and dangerous behavior included driving over a curb and coordinating with another unlicensed vehicle to block and intimidate law enforcement officers,” the spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an email.

Garcia-Hernandez said the claim that she was driving recklessly and attempted to block ICE vehicles with another “unlicensed vehicle” was “100% not true.” She added that her partner showed up after she had already been detained and he was driving a car with plates and current tags.

As of Tuesday morning, ICE still had her phone and her engagement ring, she said. And as of Monday, no criminal charges had appeared against Garcia-Hernandez in federal court records.

But Garcia-Hernandez remained steadfast.

“I think that we should continue to use our voices and continue to warn others about what’s happening because it is not OK how our people, our community is being treated,” she said. “And me as a U.S. Citizen, I ended up being treated this way just because I was taking pictures and videos of (them) to warn the community. They were mad because they were getting exposed.”

 Her Portland attorney, Michael Fuller, sent a letter Friday to  Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, decrying his client’s treatment. He also said he had asked the Oregon Department of Justice and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office to criminally investigate the agents’ actions, according to the letter.

“Ms. Garcia-Hernandez was followed by federal agents after she photographed their government vehicle on a public road,” the letter reads. “The agents then used excessive force to arrest Ms. Garcia-Hernandez, including by smashing out her window and dragging her out of the car, resulting in injuries.”