Raids target illegal immigrants ordered to leave U.S.

As federal immigration authorities step up raids at work sites and homes, a Times reporter and photographer accompanied a Seattle-based team whose mission is to find and arrest immigrants who've been given final orders to leave the country.

IT WAS DAYBREAK — not quite 5:30 a.m. — and a sprawling apartment complex in Burien, popular among immigrants, was stirring to life.

From open doorways, men in work boots, some with caps pulled low on their heads, made their way to parked cars — a few glancing nervously at a small knot of immigration officers nearby.

At an hour when a few residents were leaving for work but most were still asleep, a team of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had come in search of a single target: a mother of four who, after violating a no-contact order nearly a decade ago, was ordered removed from the country.

Ana Reyes-Velasquez, a hotel maid, would later say she had lived in fear of this day.

It came last week on the morning of her 41st birthday — a day she'd planned to spend watching her 13-year-old daughter graduate from Seahurst Elementary School in Burien.

But the ICE officers gathered outside her apartment that morning had other plans.

While bigger work-site raids grab large numbers of illegal immigrants and splashy headlines, raids at private homes go largely unnoticed.

They happen almost daily, part of an aggressive nationwide effort to find and deport more than 600,000 immigrants for whom a judge has issued a final order of removal.

Reyes-Velasquez was the Seattle team's second target that day.

Outside her second-story apartment, officers knocked, identifying themselves as "police" and rousing her 20-year-old son, Carlos Quiroz, who'd been sleeping on a mattress on the other side of the door.

Because he thought they were local police and not immigration officers, he said, he opened the door, and for his mother, "the life that I have came to a stop."