Federal agents mistook a longtime Washington County, Oregon, employee for an illegal immigrant just as a nearby demonstration against arrests of undocumented immigrants ended at the courthouse in Hillsboro.
The mistake rattled Isidro Andrade-Tafolla, a married father of three children who lives in Forest Grove and has worked as a road maintenance worker for the county for nearly 20 years.
"It was frightening, disturbing, humiliating and I'm still trying to process being stopped because of my color and my race," he said Tuesday.
The morning before, he thought it was odd to see a van stopped in the no-parking zone in front of his pickup as he and his wife were leaving the Washington County Courthouse, he said.
They were near Northeast Lincoln Street and Third Avenue, about a block away from the courthouse, and had passed remnants of the demonstration at the building. About 70 people were protesting the arrest last week of two undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside the courthouse.
Andrade-Tafolla, who is Latino and a U.S. citizen, said it didn't occur to him at first when a man and woman emerged from the van and repeatedly asked for his name and ID that he was caught in the crosshairs of ICE.
"They never identified themselves even when my wife and I kept asking who they were and why they wanted my information," said Andrade-Tafolla, 46.
"I gave them my name. They said they had a picture of me, that I wasn't here legally and when they showed my wife and I the picture, there was no resemblance except we were both Hispanic." The woman in the van had the photo on her cellphone.
Andrade-Tafolla said he had been accompanying his wife to a court hearing and later recalled that the woman, dressed in an Oregon Ducks hoodie, and the man, in a blue-and-white plaid shirt, had sat near them outside the courtroom, went inside with them for the hearing and apparently followed them outside.
As he and his wife were trying to explain that he wasn't the person in the photograph, four more unmarked cars pulled up around them and eight other people got out, he said. One man had a jacket with "ICE" written on it and had a badge.
Andrade-Tafolla said none of them identified themselves either. At some point, the man in the ICE jacket took a look at the photo, looked at Andrade-Tafolla, then said, "That's not him, let's get out of here."
The woman said "sorry" and then they left, Andrade-Tafolla said. He estimated the encounter lasting about a minute and a half.
"It was like seeing roaches scatter when you turn on the light," he said. "They just left my wife and I standing there."
Andrade-Tafolla told his story to The Oregonian/OregonLive on the day Jeff Sessions came to Portland, where he denounced sanctuary cities and advocated for tougher immigration enforcement. KPTV caught part of the encounter on camera Monday while covering the demonstration.
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon said its legal observers have seen at least 10 people arrested by ICE agents at the county courthouse since April. That same month, Oregon Chief Justice Thomas Balmer wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly urging ICE to stop making arrests in and around Oregon's courthouses.
Sarah Armstrong, an Oregon ACLU spokeswoman, said observers now go to the Washington County Courthouse every Monday since receiving a tip that the ICE arrests were still occurring.
Among the arrests, she said, were three people taken into custody while leaving the courthouse in May, including a mother who said she had two children to pick up from a babysitter; three others arrested in a fourth-floor courthouse hallway in July; and one man arrested by ICE at the courthouse last Monday and loaded into a car with two other apparent detainees.
Armstrong said it's common for agents to dress in plain clothes and not fully identify themselves as agents when they approach people to detain them.
"The hard part about all of this is you wonder who is ICE really accountable to?" Armstrong said. "When Oregon's top officials ask for these actions to stop and they still do it, what do we do about that?"
Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman, said the agency doesn't cumulatively track ICE arrests by location, but confirmed that immigration officers took two men into custody last Monday outside the Washington County Courthouse.
The men were previously deported after entering the country illegally, Kice said. They both pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of intoxicants last week, she said, and the officers conducted themselves "in accordance with the authorities conveyed to them under federal law and the Constitution."
She declined to comment on the encounter involving Andrade-Tafolla.
