An immigrant man in Chicago was erroneously placed in the gang database, Chicago Police admitted this week in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez and his family, who filed a lawsuit in May 2017, said the mistake led Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to violently arrest Catalan-Ramirez during an operation targeting suspected gang members, according to Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD).
In March, the father of three sustained injuries by ICE officials who “conducted a warrantless home raid and engaged in excessive use of force” in his Back of the Yards residence, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court. Authorities violated his right to due process in his removal proceedings by characterizing him as a gang member, the suit says.
Catalan-Ramirez was added to police databases in 2015 when he was approached by officers outside a neighbor’s house while he was standing with someone who was gang affiliated. The suit claims the police wrongly assumed Catalan-Ramirez was a gang member “because he was a young Latino who lived in a neighborhood that was considered to be gang territory.”
The criteria by which Chicago police officers can enter an individual into the gang database include: self-admission; wearing emblems, tattoos, or other markings of a specific gang; using hand signals or other symbols of a gang; or identification by an officer who has special intelligence on the subject of gangs.
When a person fits the aforementioned criteria in any interaction they have with CPD, officials are instructed to fill out an Automated Gang Arrest Card into their system known as I-CLEAR. In the letter, Police indicate that there is no Gang Arrest Card on file for Catalan-Ramirez. Further, the department cannot verify that Catalan-Ramirez is a gang member as defined under Illinois statute 740 ILCS 147/10, the letter reads.
CPD has said in the past that it “does not communicate and does not work in conjunction with federal immigration agents”, according to department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. But department orders allow information-sharing in the National Crime Information Center, which ICE can access, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Guglielmi did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Although we are glad to see that the city is willing to admit their mistake, it’s too little too late,” stated Xanat Sobrevilla of OCAD. “The City of Chicago needs to admit that there are systematic problems with the entire gang database, and as a start, stop putting names into this list, review its content, and create avenues for people to seek their removal from the list.”
Once a resident is identified as a documented gang member, it will never come off their record, not even through expungement, according to the Community Activism Law Alliance.
“My family is still suffering the consequences” stated Celene Adame, the wife of Catalan-Ramirez. “If Wilmer’s name had not been on the database to begin with, immigration agents would not have raided our home and we could be spending Christmas together,” she said.
Another Chicago man from the South West Side currently in deportation proceedings, Luis Vicente Pedrote-Salinas of the Gage Park neighborhood, filed a lawsuit in July against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department for wrongly listing him as a gangbanger, making him a target for arrest and ineligible for immigration relief. The suit alleges that CPD’s gang database violates the Illinois Civil Rights Act that prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination.
An analysis of Chicago’s gang database by the UIC Policing in Chicago Research Group showed that 96 percent of the nearly 65,000 people identified as suspected gang members are Black or Latino.
“Individuals are included in the gang database without any notification by CPD and then they are not allowed any opportunity to contest their inclusion in the gang database,” said Pedrote-Salinas’ attorney, Vanessa del Valle. “Chicago cannot truly be a sanctuary city until CPD ends this practice.”
In a six week gang-enforcement operation earlier this year, ICE officials arrested 1,378 suspected gang members, the agency reported. About 933 of the arrestees were U.S. citizens, while 445 people or 32 percent were foreign nationals, authorities said.
A Department of Homeland Security internal memo from July 2017 instructed federal agents to detain teenagers who met at least two criteria of gang membership.
