The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Taken to Alamosa, Colorado Springs and Denver before being released
At the end of January, a 21-year-old Gunnison County man went through what might be described as an Orwellian ordeal that seems to have been a result of racial profiling.
Bernardo Medina was picked up and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on January 27 following an unrelated hearing in Gunnison County court. The officers seemed to believe Medina was an undocumented immigrant.
According to Marketa Zubkova, a Gunnison organizer for the non-profit organization Hispanic Affairs Project, Medina produced a Colorado ID that Tuesday afternoon but the officers did not believe it was real. In fact, Medina was born in Montrose but grew up in Mexico when his family returned to Jesus Maria, Nayarit when he was just nine months old. “He doesn’t carry his birth certificate around with him,” Zubkova said.
Medina doesn’t speak English very well and this reporter doesn’t speak Spanish very well, so Zubkova related the incident.
The ICE officers took Medina to a processing center in Alamosa the afternoon of January 27 where they told him he would have to answer some more questions. He called his aunt and uncle who live in Gunnison that night and told them where he was. But they couldn’t reach the ICE office. Zubkova tried to help as well. She too left several messages at the Alamosa office. The calls were not returned.
Finally on Thursday, Zubkova was able to track down Medina, who had been transferred to the Front Range, first to Colorado Springs and then to Aurora. She was connected with an ICE officer and was able to get an email where she could send a copy of Medina’s birth certificate. After receiving the birth certificate the ICE officers questioned Medina further and then finally Friday told him he was free to leave.
“It took us three days to find him in the system and send his U.S. birth certificate to a deportation officer in Aurora,” explained Zubkova. “He was released in the evening on January 30 with $5 in his pocket in a city he hardly knew and his cell phone battery was just about to die. His family from Gunnison made a hotel reservation in Aurora for him for one night and picked him up the next day. No one from the ICE office even apologized to him.
“I don’t think the detention impacted him as much as being released into a city he didn’t know. It was a place where he knew no one and he had $5 to his name,” Zubkova said. “That was hard for him. And they didn’t say they were sorry or anything. They just told him he was free to leave.”
Relatives arranged for Medina to be picked up and driven back to Gunnison that weekend.
Zubkova said ICE agents come to Gunnison County a few times a month. “Sometimes they come to the court, which creates a lot fear in the immigrant community,” she explained. “It is sad but true.”
Phone calls and messages to the Alamosa ICE office, the Denver field office for the Department of Homeland Security and the public affairs office for the Department of Homeland Security along with an email were not returned to the News.
While Zubkova said it is not a frequent occurrence to have U.S. citizens picked up and detained by ICE for as long as Medina was, it does happen. Of the hundreds of thousands of men detained by ICE each year, hundreds of men with South American heritage who are actually U.S. citizens, mostly in their 20s and 30s, are picked up and held without charges. She said figures indicate that 1 percent to 1.5 percent of such detentions involve U.S. citizens.
Hispanic Affairs Project promotes social integration of the immigrant and refugee communities in western Colorado through leadership development, community organizing, advocacy and services.
