Advocates accuse Bellingham police of profiling, ignoring key fact

Whether or not racial profiling is happening in Bellingham, activists have selected the wrong person to campaign the issue.

That’s what KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz argued when speaking with a Bellingham resident who is championing a call to spotlight racial profiling, based on an incident with a local teen.

Rosalinda Guillen, executive director of Community to Community Development discussed a complaint against the Bellingham Police Department after an incident with an undocumented teenage immigrant. Guillen’s organization provides advocacy for social justice issues around Bellingham.

Guillen alleges that officers engaged in racial profiling when pulling the teen over. Rantz, however, argues that the activists are ignoring the biggest aspect of the case: the young man broke the law.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was pulled over on June 20 after Bellingham police observed him driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Juarez, 15, does not have a license and told the officers he was 18, initially. He also told them he is an undocumented immigrant. Bellingham police contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection in an attempt to properly identify Juarez. That agency took custody of Juarez and placed him in an immigrant detention center in Tacoma. Within 24 hours, Juarez was released and taken to his family in Mount Vernon, according to the Bellingham Herald.

“We’re very concerned about this incident … this incident is familiar to many others that we’ve been getting calls from our Latino community in Bellingham, Washington and also African Americans, and Native Americans who have been stopped and we believed they are racially profiled,” Guillen said.

“Since when does the police force in any city need the border patrol to identify anybody?” she asked, further arguing that what Juarez told the officers contradicts Bellingham police’s story. “They actually asked him if he was undocumented. Alfredo said he wasn’t undocumented.”

On Sept. 18, Juarez delivered a formal complaint to the Bellingham Police Department that alleged the department racially profiled him because officers asked him his immigration status, as well as violating the department’s own policies by calling border protection. He also claims police violated federal law; a law that prohibits any attempt to deport immigrants who entered the country under the age of 16 and who have applied to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Guillen told Rantz that Juarez was engaging in irresponsible behavior, as most teenagers do, but that white teenagers are treated differently in Bellingham and her organization has proof. She did not provide an example of such incidents, however.

“He was doing some of the typical teenage stuff that many other teenagers do,” she said. “We actually have another similar incident with a white teenager, that was actually much worse than this, and the police department treated this other teenager way differently than Alfredo Juarez was treated.”

“To ask a Latino teenager if he’s undocumented right away, right there, that is racially profiling. Do you ask a white teenager if he is undocumented? No,” Guillen said.

But Rantz argues there is a big hole in the argument for racial profiling in this case: that Juarez was not pulled over because of race.

“It doesn’t matter if the cop even understood that the person was brown skinned as he was driving, because he was breaking the law,” Rantz said. “There is no jurisdiction anywhere in the United States where it is legal to drive down the wrong way down a one-way street.”

“I will concede that I more believe that the reason he was asked if he was undocumented was because of his brown skin, but it does not mean that he was pulled over for that reason … if that is what the complaint is about, then you are going to lose,” he said.