Arrest exposes opaque agreement between Puerto Rico and ICE to share migrants’ information

On July 10, Inocencia Rodríguez was driving on a street in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, to take a friend to work. When she reached a security checkpoint at the site, she was stopped by two vehicles from which at least six immigration officers got out and took her into custody, even though she produced a document proving an ongoing process to regularize her immigration status.

“I feel it’s unfair because I’m doing things right and they know it; I have complied with every order they gave me. It was very unfair of them to put someone through such a sad moment, because no one expects to be locked up the way I was, handcuffed, as if they were a criminal,” says the 32-year-old Dominican mother in an interview alongside her lawyer, who is also a professor at the University of Puerto Rico Legal Assistance Clinic, María García.

García and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Legal Assistance Clinic of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, who together have represented Rodríguez, say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained her using information from the driver’s license that was shared last year with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by local authorities.

“The vehicle is registered to Inocencia, she has a driver’s license and the vehicle is also in her name,” García says. “If (the immigration officers) are on the street, they operate whatever equipment they have at hand to see which vehicle comes up as a ‘hit.’ I think they are desperate because of the detention quotas they have,” she explains.

Rodríguez, who entered the U.S. territory irregularly in June 2016, has a driver’s license because over a decade ago Puerto Rico approved a law that allows undocumented migrants to apply for that ID. It is estimated that around 6,000 undocumented migrants have obtained a driver’s license since then. The information those migrants gave to the local Department of Transportation, believing it would be safeguarded, was handed over by the government of Puerto Rico to DHS in early 2025, after Donald Trump returned to the White House with a policy of large-scale detentions and deportations.

An ICE spokesman told EL PAÍS that Rodríguez was arrested in “a focused operation,” in which she was the target, although he denied it was “related to any driving record.” ICE did not detail how its agents located Rodríguez that morning.

Few details

So far it has been impossible to learn how the Puerto Rico government shared the undocumented migrants’ data with DHS. It is only known that DHS sent a request or subpoena to the local Department of Transportation in January 2025 asking for a list of undocumented migrants with driver’s licenses. The administration of Jenniffer González sent the data between February and March of that year.

The ACLU sued the local Department of Transportation to make public the process by which it handed over the information, and three courts, including the island’s Supreme Court, have ruled that it must do so. The local government is currently exhausting its last possible remedy before the highest court in an attempt to avoid disclosing information that would shed light on its agreement with ICE. It argues mainly that it cannot do so because the information pertains to ongoing ICE investigations and that any details should be requested directly from DHS through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

A few months ago, this reporter requested from DHS the information related to its request to the government of Puerto Rico via an FOIA in an attempt to understand what safeguards were put in place when sharing undocumented migrants’ driver’s license data and whether there was ever a memorandum of understanding similar to the one, for example, reached between DHS and the Internal Revenue Service when the tax authority was asked to provide information on migrants who file tax returns with an individual taxpayer identification number. In that case, DHS had to file the memorandum in full in a case before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which helped clarify some aspects of its pact with the IRS.

In Puerto Rico’s case, DHS refused to provide information about how González’s government delivered the data and how it has been handled since it has been in the possession of DHS.

This has happened in the past in other U.S. jurisdictions that issue driver’s licenses to undocumented migrants. In addition to Puerto Rico, 19 states and the District of Columbia do so. In 2016, the National Immigration Law Center sued DHS and ICE to obtain documents showing how they access and use driver’s license information. It found that when DHS wants to locate a person it relies primarily on driver’s license databases and considers that information — such as addresses — to be more up to date than its own. In that investigation, DHS admitted to the National Immigration Law Center that it has no guidelines on how it requests driver’s license information and that its agents search for it case by case when they have “ongoing inquiries.”

The legal center also found that, although DHS claims it uses the information only to locate previously identified targets, documents it obtained revealed that ICE once asked a Department of Motor Vehicles in one of the states it examined in its investigation to search for all vehicles at a specific address, encouraged those departments to issue “flagged” driver’s licenses to undocumented migrants, and sought to obtain that data on a large scale.

ICE files with photos of driver’s licenses

In Puerto Rico, lawyers learned of the agreement between ICE and the local government when they began to see cases in 2025 in which agents went to migrants’ homes with files that included photographs of their driver’s licenses.

“There is a serious problem of broken public trust here, because the way these arrests are being carried out, first, relies on information people voluntarily gave to the state trusting it would be protected. And second, we continue to see, just like in the United States, unmarked vehicles chasing cars at high speed with no warning,” explains Annette Martínez, executive director of the ACLU of Puerto Rico.

Two operations of that kind had fatal outcomes in the United States this summer. An ICE agent shot and killed Mexican migrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, after chasing him while he was driving his truck to work. Neither Salgado nor the three other men in his vehicle were the targets of the immigration operation. Another ICE agent fatally shot Colombian migrant Joan Sebastián Durán in Biddeford, Maine, in a similar attempted roadside arrest. Durán was not the target of the operation either.

Martínez says it is worrying that data migrants provided to obtain driver’s licenses are being used, since some of them may now have ongoing processes to regularize their immigration status. “This is not just a fine; it’s about the lives and liberty of these people,” she says.

“You have to keep fighting”

In Rodríguez’s case, she says that when she was detained she handed the agents a document showing her ongoing immigration process. Her husband, a permanent resident, filed an I-130 petition demonstrating a legitimate relationship for the purpose of establishing a family. The couple has an eight-year-old daughter. Rodríguez also had been granted a provisional I-601A waiver, a pardon she qualified for after showing that an immediate relative — in this case her husband — would suffer irreparable harm if she were not forgiven for having entered and remained illegally in Puerto Rico.

“That was the document I presented when they detained me and they took me anyway,” she says.

Her detention was challenged with a habeas corpus petition in the local federal court, where Judge María Antongiorgi deemed it “illegal” given the existence of an I-130 petition and an approved provisional I-601A waiver. The judge ordered that Rodríguez not be transferred to an ICE facility outside Puerto Rico, as sometimes happens with migrants detained on the island.

But when Rodríguez later appeared before immigration judge Elvin Talavera, he declined to grant her a bond hearing, arguing that Judge Antongiorgi had not explicitly requested it. He also refused to verify the record with the approved petition and waiver, according to court documents. The judge then required that the migrant be released immediately pending her bond hearing. She was finally released after posting a $5,000 bond. But she now faces a federal process in which the government seeks to deport her.

Despite this, Rodríguez tries to carry on with her life. She works six days a week doing home maintenance and spends her evenings with her daughter, caring for her or picking her up from school when classes are in session.

“You have to keep working; we can’t cling to what happened to us, everything happens for a reason,” she says. “You have to keep fighting, because we are doing things right and, as long as you are doing things right, you have to fight.”

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