ICE has vastly expanded its work with local police to arrest undocumented immigrants at traffic stops. In a break with past practice, many of the detained have no violent criminal record.

Chelsea White and her husband were driving home from cleaning office buildings one May evening when they happened upon a Tennessee Highway Patrol checkpoint. It was a situation the couple feared — and had taken precautions to avoid.

White rolled down the driver’s side window on the Ford Fusion with their company’s logo. She drove because her husband, Hilario Martínez García, 46, is undocumented and cannot obtain a license in Tennessee.

One of the officers looked at Martínez, she recalled, and instructed them to pull into a nearby parking lot and step out of the car. Agents in black vests began patting them down and reaching into their pockets. They let White, 31, go when they saw her driver’s license. But her husband had no proof of U.S. citizenship.

The officers escorted him away.

“That was the last time I saw him,” she said.

The searches were clearly unconstitutional.

…

After Martínez was arrested, White did not hear anything for a week. She began to worry that her husband had been taken to Guantánamo or El Salvador. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She became so stressed she thought she was going to miscarry.

Finally, with the help of a lawyer, she made contact. “First thing that came out of his mouth was, ‘Are you okay and are the kids okay?’ And I said the same thing — ‘How are you?’” White said. He told her the guards hadn’t allowed him to make calls at the jail until he was about to be transferred to an ICE detention center.

Last week, Martinez was deported back to Mexico. It’s not clear what the next steps are for him. Though there is a pathway to citizenship through his 2013 marriage to White, a U.S. citizen, he never got his papers because they could not afford the legal fees. Now, his lawyer, Michael Holley, said his wife could petition for a visa for him, and he could apply for an exemption from the 10-year ban on his return that is currently in place. But that process, if successful, would take at least five years, the attorney said.

In the month and a half since Martinez has been gone, White’s life has begun to unravel. Without her husband’s income, she has fallen behind on rent. One of her cars was repossessed. And she was forced to withdraw from classes at a community college where she was pursuing a nursing degree, a lifelong dream.

She still gets questions from her children, who are 6, 9 and 11. They didn’t know their father was undocumented, and she has struggled to explain it — and why they are paying the price.

A powerful tool in Trump’s immigration crackdown: The routine traffic stop

ICE is working with local police to arrest more undocumented immigrants at traffic stops. In a break with the past, many arrestees have no violent criminal record.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/06/22/trump-ice-deportation-arrests-traffic-stops