Undocumented worker in ICE custody after delivering food to Army base in New York City
By
Mark Ferretti and Philip Guelpa
11 June 2018
Pablo Villavicencio, a 35-year-old undocumented worker from Ecuador, has been held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody for more than a week and faces possible deportation after delivering food to Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn.
While Pablo Villavicencio was granted an emergency stay of deportation by a judge over the weekend he still faces the prospect of being deported in less than six weeks.
“These several days have been really hard for us, especially for my daughters,” his wife, Sandra Chica, said in a video posted on Twitter on June 8. “We ask ICE to release him and let him come back to us.” She described Villavicencio as “the main support” of the family and added, “We’re really going to suffer if he is deported.”
On June 1, Villavicencio delivered an order from Nonna Delia’s, a restaurant in College Point, Queens, to the Fort Hamilton base. Although the base is about an hour away from the restaurant, Villavicencio had delivered food there several times before. He presented a New York City municipal identification card to gain access to the base, as he had done previously. The ID card did not satisfy the guard on duty, who asked for Villavicencio’s driver’s license. As an undocumented immigrant Villavicencio has no driver’s license.
The guard told Villavicencio that he needed to obtain a daily pass to enter the base. Obtaining a daily pass requires an on-site background check, and a soldier questioned Villavicencio insistently as he applied for the pass. The soldier called the New York Police Department, which told him that Villavicencio did not have a criminal record. The soldier…