Driving While Immigrant: Immigrants in Central MA Share their Experiences with Local Police

“Do you have T.B.?”

This is what Jorge’s son was asked when his car was pulled over by a local police officer in Milford, Massachusetts. Jorge said that his son didn’t know why he was pulled over; the officer decided not to tell him.

“Do the police have the right to question us like this?” asked Jorge, a small-framed man from Ecuador who spoke only in Spanish. Jorge was among the forty or so community members I met on Saturday afternoon who came to express their concerns that they are being targeted by the police. I could see several other men in the audience nodding as Jorge spoke, as if to say that they, too, had had similar encounters with law enforcement.

Another man, Luis, raised his hand and stood up to speak. Luis was stopped while driving his truck in Holliston, he explained in Spanish. But Luis wasn’t told why he was stopped. The officer instead ordered him out of the driver's seat and told him to walk to the back of his truck. The officer then pulled out a camera. He snapped a picture of Luis' face. Luis doesn’t know what ever happened to his picture.

These are a few examples of the stories community members shared with me and other organizers on a Saturday afternoon in a small town church basement in Central Massachusetts. A couple of community members organized the event to address concerns that the immigrant communities in their towns are being targeted by the police. They asked me to speak about their rights and about what they can do as a community to address these issues. Most of the audience members were men who had fled their indigenous communities in Ecuador to work as roofers and construction workers in Massachusetts in order to support their families.

Do the police have the right to question us like this?

This question rang in my head the entire afternoon, like it has for the past year and a half. As a matter of law, um, well it depends, I thought to myself. As a matter of human dignity, NO, I wanted to scream. I put on my lawyer hat and thought, how can we prove that people are being targeted?...What was the basis for the stop?... Did the officer have reasonable suspicion?.... Did these men even have the legal authority to drive in Massachusetts? And then a moment of honest frustration swept over me as I thought, aren’t some of these men lucky that they weren’t transferred to immigration custody like so many other people in other parts of the state?

But what these stories reveal is that this isn’t just about illegal drivers in Massachusetts. And this certainly isn't just about illegal immigration. Even immigrants who are here in full compliance with the law seem to be suffering under these efforts to target anyone who “looks foreign.”

Later in the afternoon, for example, another man pulled me aside to say that he heard of two people who hold green cards and Massachusetts driver’s licenses. When they were picked up by the police for allegedly committing minor traffic violations, the officers didn’t believe that their licenses were real. Both of them had their licenses confiscated and their cars were towed.

For the past year and half, I have been listening to peoples’ stories. From what I have seen and heard, the theme in Massachusetts is far too pervasive: if you’re a brown-skinned immigrant, you are presumed illegal until you prove otherwise.