Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Chicago Reporter

Driving while Latino: officers are pulling over Hispanic drivers at a disproportionately high rate, and the consequences can go well beyond a ticket.

Article Excerpt
In the summer, Osman Maldonado drove less than a mile from his house to a gas station near a busy intersection in northwest suburban Crystal Lake for cigarettes. He spotted a McHenry County Sheriff's deputy parked in the lot of an adjacent boutique. The deputy walked up to the Honduran immigrant's window and asked for his driver's license and registration. Then he examined Maldonado's wallet.

Inside, the deputy found a fake green card. He arrested the Honduran immigrant and booked him on a felony charge of possessing fraudulent documents. A $25,000 bond was assigned.

Maldonado, who arrived in Chicago in 2003 and had been earning up to $275 a week as a machine operator at a tool storage manufacturing company, spent the next 30 days in jail. He pleaded guilty to a downgraded misdemeanor for the fake documents, with time already served in jail as his sentence.

But his legal nightmare didn't end there. On the day of his release, the sheriff's office transported him to a hearing in immigration court. With his petition for asylum already denied, the 25-year-old father of two is facing deportation-with an electronic monitoring device now strapped to his right ankle.

Maldonado said he's startled to find himself in this predicament--out of something as routine as a traffic stop. "My dream was just to work and get ahead," he said.

Maldonado's experience is familiar to many Latinos living in the six-county Chicago area. In many communities with a recent surge in immigrant population, Latino drivers are being stopped at a higher rate by the police than their share of the driving-age population, and they are more likely to have their cars searched than their white counterparts, shows a Chicago Reporter analysis of 2007 traffic stop data collected by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Given the increasingly tangled relationship between local law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, these traffic stops, as in Maldonado's case, can have far-reaching consequences for drivers whose immigration status is now being scrutinized more closely.

The Reporter examined the transportation department's data, which compile records collected from law enforcement agencies throughout the state, and found that 44 out of more than 200 communities in the six-county Chicago area recorded a disparity of at least 10 percentage points when the share of Latino drivers stopped is compared to their size in the driving-age population.

The analysis does not include communities that, according to the 2000 Census, had fewer than 2,500 residents, nor does it include those that recorded less than 200 traffic stops involving Latino drivers or 1,000 overall stops.

West suburban Stickney recorded the highest disparity, with Latinos involved in 52 percent of all traffic stops in the village though they made up only 19 percent of its driving-age population. West suburban Aurora, the most populous of the 44 communities, had a disparity of about 13 percentage points.

In all, nine communities, including Stickney, posted disparities of more than 20 percentage points.

The Reporter's analysis also found that Latino drivers were asked for permission to search their cars at a higher rate in 25 out of the 44 communities than white counterparts--despite the fact that Latinos were less likely to be found in possession of contraband.

The 44 communities are clustered mainly in Lake and Kane counties, along with several communities on the outskirts of Chicago in Cook County, like Berwyn and Stickney. Ten of the communities are located next to the large communities with more than 20,000 foreign-born population--Aurora, Cicero, Elgin, Skokie and Waukegan.

Many of the 44 communities had a sizable increase in their foreign-born population since 1990. According to the census, 23 out of the 44 communities saw their foreign-born population double between 1990 and 2000. During the same period, by comparison, the foreign-born population doubled in 36 percent of communities in the rest of the six-county area.

West suburban Plainfield, which had a 11.9 percent disparity in Latino traffic stops, saw the biggest increase in its foreign-born population between 1990 and 2000--a 779 percent growth.

Immigrant advocates point out that...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!