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- Fraser officers detained Santiago Zamora Perez and Evelin Josefina Perez for nearly an hour while waiting for a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent to arrive. An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan said this was likely illegal.
- Fraser officers viewed detaining migrants as a normal part of their job and joked about transferring migrants to federal custody to save paperwork.
- Local police and the CBP agent discussed immigration policy in nakedly political terms, complaining about Biden-era executive orders and rulings by “leftist courts.”
Police video of a December traffic stop highlights the role local officials are playing in enforcing President Donald Trump’s antimigrant campaign.
Fraser police stopped Detroit residents Santiago Zamora Perez and his mother, Evelin Josefina Perez, on the evening of Dec. 7. The officers turned the pair over to federal immigration agents, who sent them to a Texas detention center. Evelin and Santiago were released this week.
Outlier Media obtained video of the stop through a public records request. The footage below, edited and annotated by Outlier, provides a rare window into a local police department’s decision to deputize itself in service of federal immigration enforcement.
Outlier Media edited the body cam footage from Fraser police to tell the story of Santiago and Evelin’s arrest.
“This is a pretty disgusting example of how local police officers collaborate with immigration authorities,” said Ramis Wadood, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, after seeing the video.
City of Fraser officials, including Public Safety Director Samantha Kretzschmar, City Manager Elaine Leven and Mayor Michael Lesich, did not return requests for comment.
During a public meeting this month, George-Michael Higgins, a member of Fraser City Council, said officers were doing their duty, but criticized the behavior of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent who was called to the scene.
“I don’t think our officers were intending to do anything more than enforce our traffic laws,” he said.
Status check
Evelin was feeling ill when she picked Santiago up from baseball practice. She asked her son, who is unlicensed, to drive.
They were partway home to Detroit’s eastside when a police car began following them closely.
Santiago slowed down sharply. The lights flashed. He pulled into a Popeye’s parking lot.
The officer, C. Frontiera, approached their black Kia sedan. It was immediately clear that the language barrier would be a problem, but Frontiera managed to ask them for ID. Santiago handed him a Venezuelan passport.
Frontiera took it and walked back to his cruiser.
“Come on, man,” he muttered to himself.
“Illegal?” asked N. Brown, another Fraser officer, who just arrived at the scene.
“Probably,” Frontiera said.
A minute later, he put out a call to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“I have someone that doesn’t speak English,” he said into the phone. “He handed me a passport. I just want to verify his status.”
CBP called back and confirmed it would send an agent to the scene. Speaking to Brown, Frontiera hesitated over how to fill out the police report. Driving without a license is a misdemeanor, and listing it would trigger a complex bureaucratic charging process.
“I’m not going to issue him for ‘no-li’ (no license), he’s a minor,” Frontiera said. “I’m just going to transfer over (to CBP).”
“Get him outta here then, that’s less paperwork for you,” Brown replied, smirking.
Both officers appeared to view arresting migrants as a normal — and increasingly common — part of their job.
“Krauss got one the other day,” Brown said of another Fraser officer. “I would just do what he did.”
Frontiera decided to list “immigration violation” as the primary reason for the arrest, though he still didn’t seem sure how to document the interaction.
“I’ve never had one,” Brown reflected. “And Border Patrol is actually coming out now for this kind of stuff ever since Trump got in.”
They waited around for a few minutes, then Frontiera decided to arrest Santiago.
“Border Patrol is still getting back to me,” he told Brown. “The female’s in ‘visa overstay,’ is what he said. I don’t know what the f— that means. They’re still running the male, so I’m just going to pull him out because either way he’s no-li (driving without a license).”
Santiago got out and faced the car. Frontiera patted him down and peppered him with questions that he struggled to understand.
Frontiera pulled out his phone and opened a translation app.
“Are you in the country illegally?” he typed.
Santiago explained that he was in the country legally and had an upcoming court date. He acknowledged that he didn’t have a driver’s license.
“Why are you driving?” Frontiera asked.
“My mom is sick,” Santiago said.
Frontiera handcuffed Santiago and moved him to the back seat of the squad car, explaining that he was being detained because he didn’t have a license.
Then he returned to the Kia and, again typing on his phone, offered Evelin a different explanation.
“He’s just being detained ‘til I can ID him as legally in the country,” Frontiera told her.
CBP called back a few minutes later.
“Do you want both of them, then?” Frontiera asked the agent. After a pause, he responded: “OK, I’ll detain the other one.”
“Can I make a call?” Evelin asked when he walked back to the car, her voice wavering. She spoke in Spanish.
“You’re being detained,” Frontiera responded in English.
“Sorry?” Evelin asked, still in Spanish.
“You’re being detained,” he said again.
“No speak English,” she said.
As Evelin burst into tears, he pulled out his phone again and tried to type “you are being detained” into the Translate app. Because of an autocomplete error, the app translated the text to “you are detained until.”
Frontiera turned the phone toward her; she looked at it for a few seconds, nodded and said nothing.
“My son, where is he? My baby?” Evelin asked in Spanish as Frontiera walked her, handcuffed, to the squad car.
Neither officer responded, perhaps because they didn’t understand. Moments later, they moved her into the squad car with Santiago.
CBP agent arrives, complains of ‘leftist courts’
Fifty-seven minutes after Frontiera first pulled Santiago over, a CBP agent pulled into the Popeye’s driveway.
“It appears they both have court dates, but my supervisor told me to bring them in anyway,” the agent, S. Hayes, told the Fraser officers.
Opening the cruiser door to speak with Evelin, Hayes chastised her for not having her immigration paperwork with her.
“Can I call my paralegal so they can send it to me?” she asked, speaking in Spanish.
“Mi español es muy malo,” Hayes replied. My Spanish is very bad.
He moved Santiago and Evelin to his green-striped Border Protection SUV, telling them they needed to come to the station to be fingerprinted.
Frontiera asked Hayes to explain Evelin’s and Santiago’s legal statuses.
“It’s very convoluted right now because the Biden administration did a lot of things that weren’t, like, legal,” he said. “They invented things.”
“Imagine that,” said B. Cantwell, a Fraser sergeant who’d just arrived at the scene.
“Once Trump came in and the courts decided that all these things they gave them aren’t valid, they were rescinded,” Hayes continued, adding: “But then leftist courts were getting in the way and putting injunctions on it.”
Hayes noted that he didn’t think it was worth arresting two asylum seekers who were already cooperating with the immigration courts, especially since there wasn’t enough space in the holding facilities at his CBP post.
“If it was up to me, I would have been like, ‘Well, they have a court date,’” he said.
Hayes drove away, taking Santiago and Evelin with him. “Part of me feels bad,” Frontiera told Cantwell, “but at the same time there’s not much I can do.”
The next day, Santiago and Evelin were transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and flown to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas, where they were jailed until this week.
Santiago missed roughly a month of school and was separated from family, friends and his girlfriend. He and Evelin could have been deported to Venezuela, where they fear political persecution, as a result of the traffic stop.
Their court dates — the ones they were already planning to attend before Fraser police intervened — are still scheduled for February.
‘Beyond what the Constitution allows’
We asked immigrant advocates to watch the footage. Here’s what they said.
Christine Sauvé, spokesperson for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the footage shows “the officer going beyond the scope of his local law enforcement duties. He takes additional steps to contact CBP to ask about immigration status. He is not trained to do that and it’s not the job of local police. … Police officers are not required to ask about immigration status unless it is directly relevant to a criminal investigation.”
“The interactions in this incident were made all the more painful because this police department has not invested in language services. Professional law enforcement agencies should be using official telephonic interpretation services, not Google translate from their phones.”
Ramis Wadood, staff attorney for the the ACLU of Michigan, said, “If you’re pulling someone over for a traffic stop, generally speaking you can’t prolong that stop for reasons other than writing a traffic ticket … keeping the driver there (to check their immigration status) goes beyond what the Constitution allows. That immigration status check has nothing to do with writing a traffic ticket.”
On CBP agent Hayes’ political statements: “It’s completely inappropriate. It’s factually and legally incorrect. Unfortunately it’s not uncommon where you have federal immigration authorities bringing their own politics into their work.”
