In Puerto Rico, Immigrants Are Being Tracked, Detained & Deported — But Communities Are Fighting Back

Dominican-born Aracelys Terrero Mota went to register her small business in the municipal office of Cabo Rojo in Puerto Rico on June 5. She gave her passport, visa, and migration and work permits  — all updated and in good order. As a domestic violence survivor, she is legally protected under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to work and live on the archipelago, the place she’s called home for 21 years. But when she left the office, she was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. According to the executive director of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Annette Martinez-Orabona, Terrero disappeared from the system and was held in various detention centers in Florida, Texas, and New Mexico. After protests and demands from human rights organizations and activists, she was returned to Puerto Rico on June 28. 

“My soul cried, and even my heart ached. … It was like a horrible nightmare,” Terrero told Telemundo Puerto Rico in Spanish. 

Terrero’s immigration case — drawing outcry and attention from thousands of Puerto Ricans and fellow migrants across the archipelago via social media and the press — has become the most visible in Puerto Rico, but her experience isn’t a solitary one. As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on immigrants through controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, arrests, and deportations, agents in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, have followed suit — disproportionately impacting Dominican migrants on the island. In fact, as of June 2025, 500 people have been detained in Puerto Rico, and nearly three-quarters of those arrested are from the Dominican Republic.

“We are currently being persecuted, rounded up, deported, and there have even been deaths,” José Rodríguez, president of the Dominican Human Rights Committee of Puerto Rico, told Somos. The committee was born during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when there was an uptick of Dominicans leaving their island to find better employment opportunities in Puerto Rico. 

In 1997, Dominican migrant Rafael Herrera was beaten to death by a Puerto Rican police officer during a drug bust. In 2009, police struck and handcuffed undocumented Dominican immigrant Franklin Cáceres Osorio before throwing him from a two-story building and leaving him to die. Most recently, on March 28, Dominican worker Antonio Báez climbed onto the roof of the warehouse where he was employed — about 30 to 35 feet high — to avoid arrest during an ICE inspection. While attempting to hide, he fell and died.

Dominicans make up one of the largest immigrant populations in Puerto Rico. But despite having lived on the sister island for generations and contributing significantly to its social and economic fabric, the community has increasingly been targeted by state-sanctioned xenophobia and anti-Blackness — sentiments that have been emboldened under President Donald Trump and Puerto Rican Governor Jenniffer González’s anti-immigration rhetoric and policy.

For instance, in 2013, then-governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla, a Democrat from the pro-commonwealth status party in Puerto Rico, approved Law 97, which allowed for people without official immigration status to obtain a driver's license. “That’s one of the achievements we’ve had, and close to 20,000 people have that license — before New York and a lot of other states,” Rodríguez said. However, in the last year, González, a Republican and Trump ally from the island’s pro-statehood party, and her government has used it to betray the entire undocumented population in Puerto Rico. 

In June, both the Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTOP) and ICE confirmed private data had been shared between the two agencies for several months. ICE subpoenaed the Puerto Rican government for the information, and it quietly did as it was told, without public hearing or warning beforehand. ICE proceeded to use the data to detain people in their homes. 

Now in Barrio Obrero, a San Juan neighborhood known for its Dominican population, people are afraid — to stay inside or leave their homes. “There are many people who live in fear. There are many people who do not want to leave their homes, who find it difficult to get to work,” a pro-immigrant organizer in Puerto Rico, who preferred to stay anonymous, told Somos. “It's dangerous. People are coming here as if it's the Nazi times. There are people hiding out of fear.” 

This fear is deliberate and strategic. González and her pro-statehood party have aligned themselves closely with Trump and his hardline immigration policies, pressuring local institutions to follow suit or face consequences. In January, González warned that public workers and Puerto Rican agencies refusing to cooperate with ICE or attempting to block raids could jeopardize federal funding. But that claim doesn’t hold up. Sanctuary cities and counties across the U.S. have successfully challenged similar threats in court, affirming that federal funds cannot be withheld on that basis. If Puerto Rico’s government chose to, it could adopt sanctuary policies just as states like California and New York have. For now, however, only two municipalities — Aguadilla and Hormigueros — have declared themselves sanctuaries.

As González’s government preys on immigrant communities, it also proposed an extension to the controversial Act 60, which allows “investors” — often white, wealthy, and American — to come to Puerto Rico and take advantage of tax incentives, until 2055. This extension was approved on June 25, just days before Terrero returned to Puerto Rico after being illegally detained. 

Even more, like in the U.S., where Puerto Ricans, who are born U.S. citizens, have been detained during immigration raids, Afro-Boricuas in their homeland have also been targeted and racially profiled by ICE agents. 

“We know and we recognize that anti-Black racism is what it perpetuates,” Gloriann Sacha Antonetty Lebrón, founder of the popular Black Puerto Rican magazine Revista Étnica, told Somos. “This is not the first time this has happened. This is a pattern that keeps repeating itself to benefit a few, to generate power for a few. [They want to] take away what belongs to us and what is ours. [To] tell our people, our neighbors, to the caribeños, any other person who wants to come here to live and have opportunities for a dignified life, that they can't be here."

While much of the government is actively participating in its own colonialism, many Puerto Ricans have been pushing back, speaking out, and protesting against escalating raids and deportations, which is also impacting Haitian and South American migrants.

“In many ways, Puerto Rico is a safe haven in the Caribe,” Antonetty Lebrón said. Her publication has been attempting to keep it that way, directly supporting immigrant communities through reporting immigration news, sharing educational tools, and leading mutual aid efforts. 

Like them, other grassroots community organizations like Taller Salud, Centro de Apoyo Mutuo, Brigada Solidaria del Oeste, Enlace Volunteering Group, and more have been expanding their focus to support immigrants. On social media, even Bad Bunny has spoken out about the raids, recording and posting an Instagram Story showing ICE agents in unmarked RAV4s on Avenida Pontezuela in Carolina. “Instead of leaving the people alone and working," he's heard criticizing the agents.

“What the Puerto Rican government hasn't done for the community, the Puerto Rican people are doing,” Rodríguez said. “I go out running in the morning, and sometimes I have to stop to talk to people in their cars, or they honk and yell, ‘we are with you.’ That has never been seen before.”