No one knows exactly how many immigrants are living without legal status in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Rebecca González-Ramos, ICE's top investigator on the island, estimates it's about 20,000, and since January it's been her job to track down and deport every last one of them.
"Our mandate," she said, "is 100 percent. So everybody that's in the United States, and in this case in Puerto Rico, without an immigration status, needs to be removed or deported."
González is the Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. HSI is Immigration and Customs Enforcement's intelligence office – one of dozens of HSI offices nationwide. She is the first woman to lead her office, responsible for investigating customs fraud, drug and weapons smuggling, and human trafficking. But since she assumed the role a few days after Donald Trump's return to the White House, her agents' number one priority has become finding immigrants to deport.
They've adopted more aggressive strategies than in past administrations. They're expanding surprise raids at hotels and construction sites, knocking on the doors of people with deportation orders, and questioning others on the street. She says they've asked Puerto Rico's department of motor vehicles to hand over the names and addresses of the roughly 6,000 people who got licenses under an immigrant-friendly law that extended driving privileges to people without legal status. They take informant tips from everyday citizens calling in to report on their neighbors.
González-Ramos sat down for an interview with NPR in her San Juan office last week. She said to date ICE agents in Puerto Rico have arrested close to 500 immigrants for deportation in the four months since Trump returned to power. Fewer than 80 had criminal records, and among those who did, the single charge most had faced was for re-entering the United States after a prior deportation. Three-quarters of those arrested have been Dominican nationals. Dominicans have immigrated to Puerto Rico for decades, becoming part of the fabric of society as construction workers, domestic helpers, cooks, lawyers, professors, teachers and police officers. Recent raids have sent terror coursing through Dominican neighborhoods.
González-Ramos's operations on the island offer a glimpse into how ICE offices nationwide are ramping up their surveillance, investigation and enforcement tactics to deliver on President Trump's mass deportation promises.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
NPR: Now that your mandate is to deport 100 percent of people here without status, do you have quotas? (Top Trump administration officials have said they have a national quota to arrest 3,000 immigrants without legal status daily).
González-Ramos: No, we don't have quotas. We just have a mandate to execute our authorities and use our resources to enforce immigration.
NPR: I want to talk about how you find people. What have you told your agents to do differently? What are they allowed to do now that they weren't allowed to do in the past?
González-Ramos: Their authority has always been the same. We work a lot with intelligence and information received. We have a communication center here. We receive a lot of calls from individuals saying, hey, my neighbor that's present here illegally, or my ex-wife, you know. Those leads are worked by the intel group. We help identify the addresses of those individuals that already have final deportation orders. We're the investigative arm, we work on leads, we develop sources, we develop different information that comes, trying to first make sure that the information is good. We're not going to move forward on something just because it came in. What I've told my agents is that they need to make sure that they do everything by the law and treat everybody with dignity.
NPR: Do they need warrants? Either judicial arrest warrants or administrative warrants? (An arrest warrant is issued by a judge and is required for an ICE agent to enter a home or other private space for an arrest. An administrative warrant is signed by an ICE official and directs an agent to detain someone, but does not authorize entry to a home or private space.)
González-Ramos: Arrest warrants sometimes are necessary because, for example, we had an individual we had identified and he was inside his house and he didn't want to come out. So we had to get an arrest warrant.
NPR: What about when your agents are going into a neighborhood and there's a group of men and women on a street corner. Are you telling them it's okay to use their suspicion that someone might be in the country illegally to detain them now and ask questions later?
González-Ramos: The way it works is if there's a group of people on a corner, the officers will go and then we'll ask them questions to determine alienage. And they'll say, "Yes, I'm a legal permanent resident," and we'll say, "Let me see your ID." And some of them have it with them. Some of them don't. I think now, these days, they all have it with them. And based on those answers is when we decide if we're going to detain them or not.
NPR: It becomes very subjective. Agents going out and deciding who to question or to detain. I've spoken with a couple of Dominicans (with legal status) who've been detained and then released. Why is that happening?
González-Ramos: It's going to depend on the situation we're in. The most important thing is our officers' safety. So, if I'm in a place where there's a lot of people surrounding us and it's a big operation, I cannot let you go and find your Legal Permanent Resident card. Because I don't know where you're going to go. I don't know if you're going to go to a car. I don't know what you have inside that car. That's why it's so important for them to have their identification with them. Anybody who has residency, they need to have that card with them. Even on the card, it says by law, when you're a legal permanent resident, you need to have your ID with you at all times.
NPR: What about a citizen?
González-Ramos: I've never detained a citizen here. If it's a citizen, it's a citizen.
NPR: What is the agent using to decide whether enough suspicion exists to detain someone?
González-Ramos: The agent can justify his acts by different means. Reasonable suspicion. They had identified an individual that didn't have status right next to them. But those persons are not being detained. A person is being asked questions about their nationality. When you're detained is when I put the cuffs on and I put you in the van and I transport you to the facility to process you. And if you tell me you do have status, those are the first individuals that we're going to make sure that we check in the system so we can release them. We don't want to detain anyone that has a legal status in the U.S.
NPR: But you're acknowledging that you are doing that, because if they've made it to the facility, you're checking them out there, not in the street.
González-Ramos: Yeah. I have to transport you because you don't have your documents with you. There's no other way for me to determine that unless I check the system and I run your fingerprints.
NPR: I've been speaking with people in the Dominican community who say they feel they're being targeted because they're Black and because they have Dominican accents.
González-Ramos: I don't agree with that at all. That would be very irresponsible of us to intervene with individuals just because they have a Dominican accent. I want to say maybe 80 percent of the agents that I have are from Puerto Rico. So they know that a large number of our Dominican population are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. The majority are not here without status. There's been people detained from all sorts of countries. It's not just Dominicans. Most of them have been Dominicans because they are the highest population here from a foreign country (About 60 percent of Puerto Rico's foreign-born population is Dominican).
NPR: Are your agents as likely to question on the street a white person with a Puerto Rican accent?
González-Ramos: If we are looking for an individual with a final order of deportation in a group of four, all four are going to be asked the questions. It doesn't matter if you have blue eyes and blonde hair, or if you have a Puerto Rican accent. Here in Puerto Rico, we're of all colors. Moving on accents and moving on people's color, first of all, it's illegal. And second of all, it's not the way HSI does business. We work based on intelligence and executing either arrest warrants or final orders of deportation. And everybody in that group is going to be asked, no matter how they look or how they sound.
NPR: The driver's licenses (that Puerto Rico has given to about 6,000 immigrants without legal status). Did you request that list?
González-Ramos: The Puerto Rico government is cooperating with us in anything that we ask them for. And we're asking for that in order to move forward with the mission. And we're waiting.
NPR asked a spokeswoman for Puerto Rico's governor about this on Monday afternoon. She acknowledged receipt of the request. NPR will update the story if we receive an additional response.
NPR: Your operation at La Concha Hotel in early May (in which 53 Dominican construction workers were arrested) -- how did you decide to go there that morning?
González-Ramos: There was intelligence. And we moved forward with it. As part of all of our business inspections, we get a lot of intelligence from competitors, people that, you know, might have bid for that same contract and know that the individual that actually won the bid can do it because he's paying his workers less. A lot of revenge. I'm not saying that's what happened here. That's just an example.
NPR: These revenge tips – are you getting a lot of people now reporting people they don't like?
González-Ramos: Yeah, we didn't used to get that. Now, I want to say we get around 10 to 12 calls a day in our communications center, and maybe five of those are immigration related. There's always somebody that it's like, there's a neighbor that they don't get along with, or an ex-husband, ex-wife, ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend.
NPR: And your agents will go check it out?
González-Ramos: Yeah, it's added to the leads. And if it's a valid lead, we'll move forward on it. Everything that comes through the tip line in regards to immigration, it's going to be a priority.
NPR: Do you recognize the fear, the terror, that the people and communities that you're targeting for deportation feel?
González-Ramos: I can definitely see where they can be concerned and worried. It's a change in somebody's life. But I don't see a reason for them to be scared or live in fear, because the message is very simple. If you do not have a status in the United States, you have to leave. They're not going to be mistreated. They have mechanisms to leave on their own. I see how they can be concerned. But afraid? Or to live in fear? I don't see a reason for that.
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