SAN JUAN — Dozens of activists protested at a Puerto Rico Police (PRP) precinct in the Capetillo neighborhood of San Juan on Sunday after a series of online videos showed federal immigration officials using the precinct.

“We wanted answers,” Shariana Ferrer Núñez, founder of the feminist group Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, told The Latino Newsletter. A video posted online by the Colectiva shows Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a sub-agency within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agents walking a detained man around the precinct.

During the protest, Ferrer Núñez attempted to speak with the commanding precinct officer, but they refused to clarify if there was any formal collaboration between local and federal agencies.

A PRP spokesperson told The Latino Newsletter there are no collaboration agreements for immigration enforcement. 

“The Puerto Rico Police Department has no collaboration agreements with, nor has it ever had any role with, federal agencies regarding immigration matters. While collaboration agreements do exist, these are solely for criminal cases. In immigration matters, we have no jurisdiction to intervene in any way,” PRP spokesperson Juan José Díaz Díaz said.

Díaz Díaz claimed that one of the people detained by federal agents was taken to the precinct for medical assistance to remove TASER darts, and that federal agents changed vehicles in front of the precinct. 

There are currently no 287(g) agreements, which deputize local and state police to perform certain immigration functions, with law enforcement from Puerto Rico, according to government records. PRP is not allowed to conduct immigration checks or ask about a person's immigration status, according to a police directive revised in 2023.

However, on at least one occasion, a PRP traffic stop in May led to HSI arresting an undocumented migrant in San Juan, federal court records noted. In another case, an immigrant woman with a green card was detained in June after a Cabo Rojo municipal police officer alerted immigration officials to her presence in the municipality’s offices.

On Saturday night, videos of several violent detentions by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents spread online. 

One of the videos showed ICE and CBP agents violently detaining a man while community members were trying to free him. During the confrontation, the video shows a man crashing to the ground after being tased by a federal agent. Shortly after, another federal agent can be seen pushing a pregnant woman to the ground.

The woman, who is in the last month of her pregnancy, was later taken to the emergency room by community members after suffering contractions induced by the fall, according to local outlet Noticentro. She was attempting to protect her younger brother from being assaulted or detained, Noticentro reported.

“These agents have invaded our streets, our community, in unidentified vehicles, and they’re creating terror,” Ferrer Núñez said after the protest ended on Sunday.

Marisol Aquino, a Dominican woman who lives in the area, told The Latino Newsletter she saw about 20 people detained by federal agents in front of the PRP precinct. It’s the first time that she’s seen federal agents bring detainees to the precinct, she said. 

Federal agents walked onto her property and attempted to enter her home from the stairs of her house while they were asking for her immigration paperwork, she claimed. 

“I told them, ‘I watch television, I know the law,’ and did not let them inside the house. One of them got mad and wanted to come in. I told him to deal with it,” she said after the protest ended.

After spending about an hour in the area and asking everybody they came across for their immigration documents, the federal agents eventually left, neighbors told The Latino Newsletter. 

José Rodríguez, leader of the Dominican Committee for Human Rights, said on a local radio show, Radio Isla, that they are preparing to file a class action lawsuit against federal agencies and their agents for alleged illegal actions during immigration raids.

While it’s currently unclear how many people were detained, federal court records show that one man detained by HSI agents on Saturday has been charged with assaulting a federal officer. The man allegedly punched an HSI agent while they were attempting to detain the man while he painted a house, according to a publicly available affidavit signed by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent. 

In a statement posted to Instagram, HSI San Juan’s Acting Special Agent in Charge, Yariel Ramos, said the following: “We will not tolerate any act of violence or threats against our agents. Since January 2025, our message has been the same: any person in Puerto Rico without immigration status will be removed. It is part of our oath as public servants, and that is why our agents are committed to their mission of protecting communities and enforcing the immigration laws of the United States.
These acts of aggression will not deter us. On the contrary, we will intensify our efforts, mobilize more resources, and carry out our operations with greater determination.”

Carlos Berríos Polanco is a journalist from Puerto Rico who covers climate, conflict, and their intersection. He is also the Deputy Editor of The Latino Newsletter’s San Juan bureau.

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Latino Shifts: From the New York Times, “In the recent New Jersey governor’s race, the Democratic Party clawed back much of the ground it had lost with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential race, according to a township-level analysis of results by The New York Times.

The results are stark: The heavily Hispanic areas that shifted the most to the left in 2025 were virtually a mirror image of the places that had swung the farthest to the right in 2024. The outcome suggests that President Trump’s surge of support among Hispanic voters last year may have been fleeting, or at least not transferable to other candidates in his party.”

Public Education in Puerto Rico: From former Department of Education staffer Chris Soto via the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, “Public school students in Puerto Rico are suffering under the worst learning conditions in the United States. What would normally be considered unfathomable in any of the fifty states is the reality for 240,000 students throughout the archipelago.”

Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.

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