On Long Island, Undocumented Drivers Risk Their Freedom From Town to Town

One afternoon in May 2018, police officers in a well-to-do waterfront Long Island town called Lloyd Harbor, pulled over Felipe Iñiguez, a 49-year-old undocumented carpenter from Ecuador. A husband and father of two, Iñiguez was driving home after a day of work installing kitchen cabinets when the officers stopped him for a broken headlight. They ran a criminal background check, as is their policy, even though he hadn’t committed any crime.

What they found was an old deportation order. And while the officers sent Iñiguez home with a ticket, they also, without telling him, reported him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Three months later, ICE agents descended on Iñiguez’s home in Central Islip and took him into custody. He spent the following three months at the Orange County Correctional Facility, where he faced deportation to a country he’d left almost two decades before.