Federal immigration enforcement agents detained an undocumented man in New Bedford on Monday, raising questions about the Fourth Amendment being broken during the course of his arrest.
Juan Francisco Méndez, 29, was leaving his home street with his wife Marilú when his car was stopped by three people. Men in bulletproof vests ordered them out of the vehicle, but Marilú asked that they wait for their attorney to arrive at the scene. The incident was first reported by the New Bedford Light.
Marilú recorded the encounter on her phone, with the couple in his car and speaking with law enforcement officials in Spanish through a closed car window.
“Do you have an arrest warrant?” Marilú asked.
“We’ll take him to the office of immigration to get an order,” an agent responded.
“I can open the door, do you understand me? Do you want it hard or easy?” an agent said.
The agent said they couldn’t leave when she asked, and continued to tell them to open doors or windows. The couple’s attorney Ondine Galvez Sniffin called them and told them over speaker phone to wait six minutes and not open anything.
“They’re going to break it later, they said,” Juan Francisco Méndez told Galvez Sniffin over the phone.
Then the two men with green vests proceeded to smash a back window with a tool and open their car door, according to the video shared with GBH News by Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores.
After Marilú is out of the car, crying, she says she was taken out of the car “violently” and her husband was “treated badly.”
In a statement to GBH News Wednesday evening, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said Méndez was detained by ICE Boston.
“During the course of his arrest, he refused to comply with officers’ instructions. The officers took appropriate action and followed their training to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes the safety of our officers,” the official said in a statement.
Adrián Ventura, executive director of Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, witnessed the breaking of the window and Méndez’s detention. He believes it goes directly against the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures — like how police typically need a warrant to enter someone’s home, search their belongings or arrest them.
“It’s a complete violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said. “They didn’t let them wait for an attorney — and they weren’t lying, they had one. They wouldn’t show them an order signed by a judge. They didn’t respect their right to remain silent.”
Ventura said the officers kept saying they were looking for an “Antonio.”
Méndez is being held at Strafford County Correctional facility in Dover, New Hampshire. He has one child and no criminal record in the United States or Guatemala, according to New Bedford district court and advocates. He came to the United States from Guatemala about three years ago and is in the middle of adjusting his immigration status.
Lisa Maya Knauer is a founder of Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, as well as a professor at UMass Dartmouth in the sociology and anthropology department. She conducts research in the immigrant community of New Bedford and said about 20 people have likely been detained, that she’s heard of, since President Donald Trump took office.
“In many cases, the person who is detained was either the principal breadwinner in the family or one of the principal breadwinners in the families,” she said. “So this has really caused economic hardship to a community that is already hard-pressed economically.”
New Bedford is a city with more than 100,000 people, and over 20% were born in another country, according to the 2023 American Community Survey. Of those, 54% are noncitizens.
Mayor Jon Mitchell said Tuesday the city was unaware that Méndez arrest was going to happen. He said there has not “been an indication from ICE whether agents are focusing on the apprehension of conceited criminals — as the Trump administration has insisted — or is instead engaging in an indiscriminate round-up of individuals with uncertain immigrant status,” the mayor wrote in a statement.
But in an update on Wednesday afternoon, New Bedford city spokesperson Jonathan Darling said the city later learned that ICE had in fact alerted the local police Monday morning.
“Communication between ICE and the NBPD [New Bedford Police Department] has been inconsistent. For example, an ICE agent did call the NBPD Monday morning during its operation in the North End, but they said the activity was happening near an address on Deane Street. The incident in question occurred blocks away on Tallman Street,” said Darling.
Jacob Chin, a community organizer and attorney who lives in New Bedford, says the response from local officials has been “disappointing.”
“The mayor, the City Council, the local police are basically like, ‘we don’t know anything about this, we can’t do anything about it,’” he said. “I think it’s just disappointing on a local level how officials are responding.”
He shares concerns about a potential constitutional infringement, too.
“If there’s no warrant, we’re protected by the Fourth Amendment [from unreasonable] search and seizure. And so I think it could certainly be a Fourth Amendment violation if there was no warrant,” Chin said.
In a press scrum on Wednesday, Gov. Maura Healey acknowledged she had seen the video, and recommended immigrants know their rights and consult with immigration lawyers.
“It’s not right,” she said. “When you watch the video of what happened in New Bedford, you know there are ways to apprehend people.
“[But] smashing and grabbing someone through their car — who has a green card, is working, is married, has a child here, no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing whatsoever so never — in fact it looks like this person was doing everything according to the immigration system to receive citizenship, on a path to citizenship. Yet is picked up,” the governor said.
Advocates believe Méndez’s immigration court date will be May 5.
