How ICE detained a Utah college student after a brief traffic stop
www.nbcnews.com
Immigration agents detained Caroline Dias Goncalves after they obtained her information from the local officer who pulled her over in Colorado, according to an administrative review.

A sheriff’s deputy in Colorado briefly pulled over Caroline Dias Goncalves before immigration agents detained her. Now county officials are conducting a review.

Questions are surfacing about the immigration detention of a 19-year-old college student from Utah after a traffic stop in Colorado this month.

Caroline Dias Goncalves, a student at the University of Utah, was driving on Interstate 70 outside Loma on June 5 when a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over. The stop lasted less than 20 minutes, and “Dias Goncalves was released from the traffic stop with a warning,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release Monday.

Then, shortly after she exited the highway, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped her, arrested her and took her to an immigration detention center.

Dias Goncalves is one of nearly 2.5 million Dreamers living in the United States. The word “Dreamer” refers to undocumented young immigrants brought to the United States as children.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    1·
    23 days ago

    “We were unaware that the communication group was used for anything other than drug interdiction efforts, including immigration,” the sheriff’s office said. “We have since removed all Mesa County Sheriff’s Office members from the communication group.”

    So it doesn’t sound the like the local sheriffs are intentionally targeting people for immigration things in this case, but rather when the traffic stop happened, the data got put into a system that is completely unrelated to ICE, but ICE is apparently using anyway.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
      1·
      23 days ago

      Sounds like the structure put in place after 9/11 with Homeland Security is starting to work in the ways predicted….

    • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      23 days ago

      I am not so sure this is unintentional. Mesa County is the very strange place that brought us Lauren Boebert and Tina Peters. Their respective Wikipedia pages are astounding.

  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    23 days ago

    the deputy claimed she was driving too close to a semi-truck.

    Oh I’ve seen this one in numerous YouTube videos where police make up a reason to pull someone over. In one you can see from the FOIAed dashcam and body cam videos that the stopped driver wasn’t even in the same lane as the semi.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      1·
      23 days ago

      One night when we were driving home from a trip to South Carolina, my wife and I got pulled over for “having one taillight brighter than the other.” Absolutely pretextual bullshit.