In May 2002, Roland Sylvain was pulled over by police while driving through Hanover County, Virginia, on his way to Florida. He didn’t know it at the time, but the traffic-related convictions that followed would derail his life, threatening the Haitian immigrant with deportation 20 years later.
Traffic stops are among the most likely sites of interaction between the public and law enforcement. The shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright by a white police officer in Minneapolis this April refocused attention on how disastrous the consequences of such interactions can be, particularly for Black Americans. If the person is an immigrant — with papers or without — these stops come with yet another potential repercussion: deportation.
In 2019, some 20,000 people who were deported by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had been convicted of a traffic-related offense. That’s 8% of all people deported that year, and it doesn’t account for other deportations that may have started with a traffic stop.
In many counties, police can check the immigration status of people they pull over and book into jail — making undocumented immigrants who are not allowed to obtain driver’s licenses in most states, but need to drive, particularly vulnerable. Activists and experts have described this pathway as the “traffic-stop-to-deportation pipeline,” an immigration process based on racially biased policing and an unjust criminal justice system.
“Disparate racial impacts in the criminal justice system mean disparate racial impacts in deportations,” wrote University of California, Davis, law professor Kevin P. Johnson in a March American Bar Association analysis.
Sylvain was a legal permanent resident with a green card at the time he was pulled over for speeding. He was on a road trip to Florida with his cousin and uncles, and he remembers cruising along with the flow of traffic. Looking back, he wonders if he was partly singled out because he was a Black man behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz, given that police are more likely to stop Black drivers than white ones. He was, however, driving on a suspended license because he had missed a payment on a traffic ticket in New Jersey. So when the officer stopped him, he panicked. Instead of giving his own name, he gave the trooper his cousin’s name and license. It was a lapse in judgment he almost immediately came to regret.
After signing his cousin’s name on two out of three traffic tickets he received, his conscience got the better of him and he confessed, he says. But the officer was not sympathetic, Sylvain recalls, and arrested Sylvain on three counts of forging public records — charges that, on the advice of his criminal defense attorney at the time, he pleaded guilty to in court. In the state of Virginia, that could have meant several years in jail. But the judge suspended that sentence and ordered probation instead, so Sylvain never did any jail time.
In the years that followed, he put the incident behind him: got married, had kids, worked a steady job. “I didn’t think that 10 years later, it would come back to haunt me,” he says.
Had he been born in the U.S. or become a naturalized citizen, this traffic stop saga would have ended here. But Sylvain was a green card holder. He had come to the U.S. from Haiti when he was seven, and has never gone back. And perhaps because he felt so American, Sylvain had been in no rush to take the final step in the immigration process and get his U.S. passport.
In 2012, the immigration consequences caught up with him. He was returning from a cruise with his family and was taken aside by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the port of entry in Tampa, Florida. There was a problem with his green card, he remembers being told, and the Virginia convictions had something to do with it. He was told that he would need to appear in immigration court, but at the time, he didn’t quite comprehend the gravity of the situation, he said.
“It wasn't until I went to federal court in New York — that’s when it hit me that this was for real. Like, ‘Wait a minute, you guys are telling me that I’m really facing removal because of traffic tickets?’” Sylvain says.
It is very difficult to say from the outset what the consequences of a traffic stop are going to be for an immigrant, says Austin Kocher, a researcher with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a government data analysis effort at Syracuse University. Kocher has studied racial profiling of immigrants, and says the outcomes can very greatly depending on geography.
In cases such as Sylvain’s, local traffic penalties and sentencing practices make a huge difference. It is only once the immigrant passes through the criminal justice system and gets a conviction that the immigration penalties are triggered. The back-and-forth — first in criminal court and then in immigration court — can throw a person’s life into flux for years.
In some counties, local law enforcement officials have been deputized through special agreements to do immigration enforcement themselves. The approach and capacity of ICE’s field directors matters also matters. If they have the time and inclination, they can sift through old criminal records and find people with traffic convictions. These targets are low-hanging fruit for deportation “because, essentially, living in the United States for any longer than a couple of years, it is pretty likely that at some point, you may have gotten pulled over for some reason,” Kocher says. “So it’s a very easy way for them to generate deportations.”
Proximity to the border also makes a difference. Within the “border zone,” a massive swath of land that extends 100 nautical miles inwards from the U.S. contiguous boundary and includes the most populous counties, it’s not just police, but border patrol officials who can stop and search motorists. Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal aid to immigrants in the borderlands, assisted in 43 deportation cases between 2019 and 2021, the bulk of which were from various counties in California. Out of this total, nine — or one in four — had definitely been apprehended in a traffic stop or at the Department of Motor Vehicles. An additional 20 cases were definitely not traffic-related. In 14 cases, the circumstances of the arrests were unclear.
What happens on the ground is also shaped by politics at the federal level, and the trajectory of Sylvain’s case reflects changes in White House. In 2014, the Obama administration set new enforcement priorities, touting that only “felons, not families” would be targeted for deportation. Under this distinction, Sylvain would technically have still been fair game, but immigration officials used their discretion and decided not to pursue him. An immigration judge administratively closed his case, using a mechanism immigration judges often use to de-prioritize cases.
When Donald Trump took office, he broadened the deportation dragnet and expanded ICE’s powers. Importantly for Sylvain’s case, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked judges’ ability to administratively close a case. Sylvain’s case was reopened. The tumult spilled over to his personal life. He ended up getting a divorce and losing his job. “I was just literally in a dark space, by myself,” he says. “It was embarrassing so I didn’t speak much about it. I didn’t really reveal too much to my family.”
In 2020, an immigration judge ruled that Sylvain’s convictions all those years ago in Virginia fell into a broad categories of crimes that, in immigration court, mean mandatory deportation. For Sylvain, this ruling meant that the only way to avoid deportation would be resentencing or a pardon in his criminal case, said Jessica Rofé, a supervising attorney at the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the New York University School of Law who has been representing Sylvain.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, the Biden administration promised a moratorium on deportations to review its practices, but its attempt to carry out this pause was blocked in court. The administration did, however, unravel various Trump-era policies and direct a review to narrow the scope of enforcement. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently told the Washington Post that he expects to make “significant changes” to ICE’s operational priorities once that review is complete. “What those changes will be, I am wrestling with right now, quite frankly,” he said.
On June 4, BuzzFeed News reported that the Biden administration has given wide discretion to prosecutors to dismiss deportation cases in a range of circumstances, including when the immigrants are longtime green card holders and have been in the country since they were children.
But it’s unclear to what extent this would help Sylvain, and a public affairs officer at Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about Sylvain’s case. “In accordance with the civil immigration enforcement priorities directed by [Department of Homeland Security], ICE is focusing its limited resources on national security, border security, and public safety,” the spokesman said in an email.
Sylvain doesn’t like to think of the worst-case scenario, and is now focusing his hopes on seeking a pardon from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. If it comes through, Sylvain plans to focus on his family: his kids and his second wife. If he can, he says he’ll do his part to try and shift the landscape of immigration law.
“I’m not looking at immigration laws as being completely flawed, but there’s definitely some tweaking that needs to be done,” he says. “[There are parts] that are way outdated” and “that really don’t make any sense at all.”