On August 3, following Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s recent arrest of Sergio “Mapache” Salazar — an 18-year-old anti-ICE protestor and DACA recipient without a prior criminal record — the FBI reportedly interrogated Salazar hoping to secure details about other illegal immigrants and activists in the San Antonio, Texas area, according to a new report from The Intercept.
“I was taken aside to a little room by the FBI,” Salazar said in the recording, provided to journalist Cora Currier by lawyers at RAICES Texas, an advocacy organization focused on immigrant rights. “They wanted to ask me about all my friends. Their words were that I am someone who has a lot to say, and they’d like to hear it. But they also were implying that if I got them useful information, about something I’m about to be a part of, that, the fact that it was useful would get to an immigration judge.”
He declined their offer.
Salazar, an aspiring filmmaker raised in Texas since the age of two, remains held in Webb County Jail in Laredo, Texas following his activist group’s non-violent encampment protests in July. “It seems evident that he was targeted here because of his involvement in the anti-ICE protests,” Jonathan Ryan, Salazar’s lawyer from RAICES, recently told The Intercept. “We’re very concerned about how directed and targeted and aggressive and quick this was,” citing this as proof the FBI have a new-found interest in the members and operations of the Abolish ICE movement.
Currier and The Intercept haven’t released the audio publicly for verification.
The FBI/ICE also provided no evidence to suggest the boy is some criminal threat, however you wouldn’t think this was the case considering his treatment from their agents. According to Salazar’s claims, following the encampment protest, he was taken in the back of the agency’s van, stripped of his belongings and shackled upon their arrival at a local abandoned Walmart. It’s unclear how a warrant was granted for Salazar’s detainment, though this isn’t surprising given investigation into ICE operations show the agency can grant these warrants internally, without much governmental oversight, all the while ICE handbooks provide legal methods to avoid the fourth amendment’s protection from illegal search and seizure.
In any case, the boy was initially sent on his merry way to the South Texas Detention Complex, a privately owned facility from the rather controversial GEO Group, who now allow ICE their space to contain soon-to-be-deported suspects. Salazar’s refusal resulted in his transfer to Webb County. While he was previously protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Salazar’s latest application was denied for being what FBI interrogators were quick to label a “bad person.”
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