The New York Times' Nina Bernstein has done some digging since the house raids on Long Island in August drew criticism from local police officers. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has denied using racial profiling during immigration raids, claiming the operations are carefully planned and executed. The newspaper's account of how the Long Island raids played out tells a different story.

The New York Times article features some of the families, employers, and communities who were caught up in the raids, which received a great deal of criticism from Long Islanders in September.

The article includes this description of the chain of events that took place in Greenport, New York:

Since there is no legal definition of criminal street gang membership, officers have tremendous discretion in deciding whom to classify as a gang associate, notes Jennifer Chacon, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written critically about Operation Community Shield.

In Greenport, Detective Sinning, 43, took the lead. He speaks no Spanish, but after years of regional meetings on the topic, he said, he knows the signs of gang participation.

 

"I gave them 15 or 16 names that we had as gang members or gang associates," he said. "They ran them through their systems and came back with four, late the night before the raid."

 

Detective Sinning said he suspected that two of the four, Salvadore Salazar-Orellana and Carlos Enrique Campos, were already in custody on assault and robbery charges. But he plugged all four names into a general database, and came up with six or seven home addresses roughly associated with the names he had been given.

 

The next day, accompanied by two uniformed officers, he guided the federal agents to those addresses.

 

In the end, only one of the men they were seeking was found: Pedro Rodriguez, a 19-year-old Greenport High School graduate who was facing his first criminal indictment, for assault. He had been released on bail to his mother's house, protesting innocence.

 

The fourth man sought by the team was José Fuentes, an 18-year-old with no criminal record, who had been designated a gang associate by a Southold officer, Detective Sinning said. But at each address they were told he had moved or had never lived there.

 

One address on the list turned out to be the home of a Greenport firefighter, James Berry, who lives across the street from the mayor. Mr. Berry, 48, an American citizen, said a dozen armed agents and officers were on his lawn. "I thought they were going to kick the door in," he recalled. But when he opened the door with a curse, an agent said, "I think we have the wrong address."

 

Detective Sinning said agents also left an address where the residents who opened their door did not appear to be Hispanic. But at several other houses on the detective's list, Latino residents answered the door, and the agents gained entry. They searched the premises, demanded immigration papers, and arrested any man who could not produce the right documents. Women and children were left behind.

 

At one house where the agents were looking for Mr. Fuentes, they arrested three men who had been asleep in separate bedrooms when an aunt opened the door. Two were cousins from El Salvador, Marvin Lopez, 21, a packer of baby vegetables at Satur Farm in Cutchogue, and Omar Lopez, 25, a Shelter Island landscaper, who had been asleep with his fiancée and infant son. The third man, Valentin Rudy Escobar Montenegro, a Guatemalan carpenter, also was with his wife and baby.

 

At an apartment mistakenly linked to Mr. Campos, one of the men who were in jail, the agents instead arrested Israel Salazar, 54, a full-time gardener for a retired couple in nearby Orient.

 

At Mr. Rodriguez's home, agents handcuffed him in the basement bedroom he shared with his American fiancée, who was pregnant. Then they took six other men in the house: Mr. Rodriguez's cousin, Arturo, 17; Walter Tzun, the Guatemalan carpenter who worked for Mr. Finne; and - from a separate apartment upstairs - four Guatemalan landscapers who had worked for the same Shelter Island company for five years.

 

For the first six to eight days, the Lopez cousins and Mr. Salazar were held incommunicado, without access to counsel, at the maximum-security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Muslim immigrants considered terror suspects were held after 9/11.

Read the full article here.