Francisco Galicia paced his cell at Fort Hunter Liggett, a vast army base 160 miles south of San Francisco, on a Friday evening in January. His mind raced with thoughts of his five daughters waiting for him at home.
Over several hours, immigration agents brought six more men into the frigid, cement-walled cell. As the men shared eerily similar stories of their arrests, Galicia realized they had all driven straight into a trap.
All seven had been driving home from fishing at a popular county lake when an official in a white truck had pulled them over along the same stretch of Jolon Road, a public, two-lane road that, unbeknown to Galicia, cuts through a corner of the military installation.
The traffic stops appeared routine at first: a light out, an open gas cap, a trunk door ajar, driving over the line. But then the officer asked for a social security number. In each case, when the men didn’t give a number, immigration agents arrived within minutes to make arrests, then drove the men to a detention site on the base where they were held overnight before being transferred to an immigration facility, Galicia said.
“Seven fishermen went fishing, and we’re the ones who got hooked,” Galicia, who was deported days later, said from his home town in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
View image in fullscreen Francisco Galicia, who was fishing before he was pulled over. Photograph: Courtesy of Francisco Galicia
The arrests of Galicia and his cellmates point to an apparent collaboration between Fort Hunter Liggett police and immigration agents that has ensnared at least 15 men since 30 December, according to Galicia and a local rapid response network, which confirmed eight additional cases. The arrests were first reported by the bilingual news magazine Voices of Monterey Bay.
Together, the accounts suggest that the Department of the Army civilian police at Fort Hunter Liggett – whose mission is to maintain law and order on base property – assisted in the federal government’s nationwide drive to arrest undocumented immigrants, a scheme that military law expe
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