This morning, a joint operation between the Florida Highway Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took place at Outerspaces Landscapes, located at 500 E. Cross St. This marks the first major ICE raid within Pensacola city limits. Multiple employees were reportedly taken into custody during the operation.
I asked Grace Resendez McCaffery, publisher of La Costa Latina, about the raid.
- “I started getting notifications early in the morning of sightings, people sending the videos, asking questions if I knew what was going on, and then I started getting calls from family members stating that their loved ones had been arrested,” she said. “I actually got a phone call from a friend who has proper immigration documents and work permits, and she was arrested as well. She called me from the vehicle that they were transporting him in.”
When her friend explained that she had her documents, McCaffery shared, “One officer was about to let her go, and another officer came and told them to arrest her anyway””
- She said that it appeared the workers were taken to the Escambia County Jail: “A lot of immigrants get transferred from Escambia to Santa Rosa before they go into ICE detention, but we have to see what their process is going to be for this issue for this operation.”
What has been the impact of the raid on the Latino community?
- “It makes people fearful, obviously, to just go to work, but I think it’s as devastating for our Latino communities, for everyone, for the community as a whole because we work hard to have a harmonious society of folks that want to live with each other and get to know each other and live together and sharing each other’s culture and that type of thing. And right now it’s causing us to kind of think twice about that and maybe kind of stay low for a little bit.
View interview – here.
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