A Haitian father arrested by federal immigration agents at his Brooklyn apartment has been moved to a detention center in Mississippi, more than 1,000 miles from his wife and young daughter, and his family, neighbors and elected officials are demanding that he be brought home.
Roberto Lamour was taken from his home on Lenox Road in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn on October 3, according to The Haitian Times and amNewYork, whose reporting was summarized by the Latin Times.
Lamour is the father of a 3-year-old girl. Friends said he has no criminal record, and the reporting did not establish his immigration status or the specific grounds for his detention.
What has alarmed Lamour’s neighbors is how the agents got in.
Residents of the building said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents identified themselves as New York Police Department officers to gain entry, first to the building and then to the apartment itself.
“They accessed the building by saying that they were NYPD,” a neighbor identified as Angelina told amNewYork. She said the agents came to the door saying they were police looking for someone, and that the family tried to cooperate. “They asked for Roberto’s ID, and then they took him,” she said.
The Police Department denied any part in the operation. In a statement, the NYPD said it had “no knowledge of or involvement in the incident in question,” amNewYork reported.
Lamour’s wife, Darchnee, at first believed local police had arrested her husband. She went to a nearby precinct to ask for his release, and it was only when officers there told her he was not in their custody that she learned ICE had taken him, according to amNewYork.
“Seeing our young daughter search for her father and cry for him is heartbreaking,” Darchnee said in a statement.
Lamour was first held at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, before being transferred to Mississippi, amNewYork reported — a distance that places him far from his family and from any lawyer or community able to visit him. The move follows a pattern in which detainees arrested in the Northeast are sent to facilities in the South, hundreds or thousands of miles from their homes.
The arrest has drawn a response from across Flatbush, a Brooklyn neighborhood that is home to one of the largest Haitian communities in the United States. On October 22, residents and elected officials gathered outside the family’s building to demand Lamour’s release, led by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who has sharply criticized the administration’s immigration tactics and was himself arrested earlier this year protesting ICE operations. “I’m going to keep fighting till Roberto comes home,” Williams said at the rally, according to amNewYork.
The Haitian Times subsequently reported that the campaign for Lamour’s return had continued, with City Council Member Rita Joseph and community organizations joining the calls to reunite him with his family, the Latin Times said.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security commented in the available reporting on why Lamour was detained, how the agents identified themselves, or why he was moved out of state. For now, his wife and daughter wait in Flatbush as the effort to bring him back from Mississippi presses on.
Source: Haitian Times
https://ctninfo.com/haitian-father-a…t-to-mississippi/
https://www.facebook.com/CaribbeanNewsMedia
Sources: Haitian Times, Latin Times
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