The call was dispatched as a routine case of shoplifting in Rotterdam, a blue-collar suburb of Schenectady. Security cameras at a Hannaford grocery store caught a Hispanic couple stashing merchandise in the bottom of a stroller carrying a 3-year-old girl.
But then the male suspect, Michel Garcia Rojas, presented police officers with the only ID he had, showing he’d served as a police officer in Nicaragua. The woman, Maria Duque-Muriel, hailed from Colombia and is also a noncitizen.
Local officers in this town of 30,000 people had no firm policy to follow in this situation: undocumented suspects of a petit crime, with a young child. Body camera footage obtained by Gothamist captured a responding officer telling his partner, “I’m kind of torn.”
The officer called his supervisor for instructions. That led a Rotterdam detective to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, triggering one the first known applications of the Laken Riley law in New York. The federal statute mandates detention for undocumented immigrants accused of a series of crimes, including murder, assault and theft.
The case is one of several recent incidents fueling an ongoing debate about immigration among lawmakers. Should New York become a sanctuary state, following some of its biggest cities in passing a law to limit all local cooperation with immigration agents? Or should local law enforcement be compelled to contact ICE every time they cross paths with an undocumented immigrant — even people suspected of the smallest of crimes?
The couple’s arrest over less than $200 in allegedly stolen groceries shows how the consequences of low-level offenses are amplified for noncitizens. Garcia Rojas grew violent after he was handed over to ICE and is now accused of assaulting a federal agent. Duque-Muriel is facing deportation – and has been separated from her child.
“I think it's a very sad case and I think that demonstrates how quickly things can escalate for people who don't have immigration status,” said Lauren DesRosiers, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Albany Law School.
Prosecutors say the pair came to the Capital Region after illegally crossing the southern border — two of more than 200,000 migrants who passed through New York since the spring of 2022. Duque-Muriel came to Rotterdam as part of a program in which New York City officials bused migrants to upstate hotels, according to police records and a local activist.
President Donald Trump pointed to that record wave of illegal immigration during his campaign for a second term, and Garcia Rojas and Duque-Muriel are now caught up in the Republican president’s mass deportation effort. Their alleged shoplifting would previously have been handled with an appearance ticket.
Progressive groups and some Democratic legislators are advocating for a state bill that would restrict how local police officers — like those in Rotterdam — can communicate with ICE. They say police shouldn’t be enforcing immigration violations, which are civil matters, and argue that the fear of arrest will prompt immigrants to hide from officers if they are crime victims.
Republicans in Washington and Albany are pushing back against those kinds of sanctuary policies. They say any crime committed by an undocumented immigrant is a crime that shouldn’t have occurred.
With days remaining in the state’s legislative session, lawmakers say they’re still not certain what bills on immigration will be adopted. Immigrant rights advocates on Tuesday held a sit-in that blocked traffic outside the State Capitol for more than an hour. Demonstrators said they were puzzled why New York’s all-Democratic leadership wasn’t taking action.
Total bill: $159.07
Garcia Rojas, 38, was dressed well for a Wednesday morning: He wore a black tie and vest over a white-collared shirt, his dark hair curling above his muscular frame. Duque-Muriel, much shorter, sat nearby in the small security room of a Hannaford grocery store, balancing the stern inquiries in a foreign language with the 3-year-old girl she was trying to distract with her phone.
Rotterdam Police body camera footage shows officers arriving a few minutes before noon on March 5, and listening as a store employee described the alleged theft. Duque-Muriel and Garcia Rojas had walked through the aisles of the store and concealed more than a dozen things in the child’s stroller, the employee said.
The items included a bag of rice, red beans, two loaves of bread, ham stock, olive oil and protein shakes. The total bill was $159.07, according to a receipt included in the arrest record.
The responding officers didn’t speak Spanish. A Hannaford employee translated as they asked for basic information from the suspects. Both Duque-Muriel and Garcia Rojas gave addresses in nearby Albany and provided the best identification they said they had. For Duque-Muriel, it was a state-issued license. For Garcia Rojas, it was his expired police identification card from Nicaragua.
A charge as minor as petit larceny doesn’t normally lead to detention, but rather a ticket demanding the accused appear in court at a later date. But that’s contingent on providing proper identification, and Garcia Rojas wasn’t passing muster.
“Because of the situation, it just kind of bumped it to a different level,” arresting officer Jordan Noyes said to his fellow officers. ICE issued a detainer, and the officers took Garcia Rojas to the station for processing — without telling him that federal agents were on the way.
The Laken Riley law
The Laken Riley law is named for a Georgia nursing student who was murdered by a man who illegally entered the United States in 2022. Trump signed the legislation during his first week in office. It mandates the federal detention of any undocumented immigrant accused of a violent crime, but also lower-level crimes of theft – like shoplifting.
“While the bill is not perfect, it sends a clear message that we think that criminals should be deported,” U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi told the Associated Press. The Long Islander was one of more than three-dozen Democrats who joined Republicans in voting for the bill.
The arrests of Garcia Rojas and Duque-Muriel are some of the first tests of the law in upstate New York, prosecutors said at a subsequent detention hearing. Enforcement of the federal law requires communication between ICE and arresting agencies, like the Rotterdam Police. That doesn’t always happen, said DesRosiers, the Albany Law School professor.
“There's no requirement under federal law or state law, uniformly across the state, that would require any enforcement agency locally to cooperate with ICE,” she said. “There are very clear limitations on what local law enforcement agencies can do.”
Sanctuary state?
Municipalities including New York City, Albany, Rochester and Ithaca have enacted sanctuary laws, which restrict how local police can cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Other jurisdictions, including Nassau County on Long Island, actively cooperate with ICE.
Rotterdam doesn’t have a clear policy of doing either, said Lt. Patrick Farry, a department spokesperson. He said officers do what they can to confirm a suspect’s identity. In the incident at Hannaford, detectives decided to call ICE because of the ID that Garcia Rojas provided, Farry said.
Legislation pending at the New York State Capitol called the New York for All Act would block state and local officials from cooperating with federal immigration agents, except in instances when a judge issues a warrant. It would have effectively blocked Rotterdam officers from calling ICE, DesRosiers said.
The bill’s advocates say that’s exactly the point.
“If we have a federal government that is hell-bent on exercising an agenda that wants to rip families apart, we don't need to help them,” Assemblymember Amanda Septimo, a Bronx Democrat, said at a recent rally for the legislation. “If we have a federal government that is hell-bent on leading with cruelty instead of love, then we don't need to help them. In fact – we have a responsibility to resist.”
Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, have both said they are troubled by recent instances of detention and deportation. Neither, though, has committed to bring the New York for All Act to a vote before the Legislature. They said they have limited power as state officials to regulate immigration enforcement.
“It's really heart-wrenching, but I don't know how much that we could possibly do,” Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, said Monday.
Gov. Kathy Hochul also isn’t backing the bill. She has continued an executive order that restricts how the New York State Police cooperate with immigration officials, but has said the state should not protect immigrants who commit “serious crimes.”
“I want to make sure we get rid of people who are seriously committing crimes, but leave the rest alone,” Hochul, a Democrat, said last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “They're part of our family, and this is where it's a huge divide.”
The governor is scheduled to testify on Thursday about the state’s immigration policies before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
A federal crackdown
Several high-profile incidents have kept immigration enforcement at the center of New York’s public conversation. Last month, a Bronx high-school student was detained in an immigration court. Immigrants were recently arrested at a seatbelt checkpoint in Albany County. Rochester officials are fighting a Department of Justice lawsuit after police officers there helped ICE agents during a recent arrest, an alleged violation of the city’s sanctuary city policies.
Republicans say localities should be helping with the deportations. They accuse Democrats of protecting known criminals, and the Trump administration is threatening to withhold funding from municipalities with sanctuary policies.
The Department of Homeland Security last month published a list of jurisdictions it plans to target.
“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release.
State Sen. Andrew Lanza, a Staten Island Republican, said sanctuary policies amount to obstruction of justice. He sponsors a bill that would require local police departments to call ICE if they arrest undocumented immigrants.
“That's the law of the land,” he said. “If I'm a guest in your house, and in this case an uninvited guest, from my point of view. In fact, I broke through the back door and now while I'm a guest at your home, I'm going to vandalize your home. I'm going to trash your home. I'm gonna steal the silverware. To me, there's a particular sort of egregiousness.”
Republicans don’t have the power to advance Lanza’s legislation in Albany. But their argument seems to have some popular resonance.
A recent Siena College Research Institute poll found that 45% of respondents said New York should support the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts, compared to 38% of registered voters who said the state should oppose them and 12% who said they were “in the middle.”
Waiting for ICE
Garcia Rojas was handcuffed to a bench in the processing area of the Rotterdam Police station for about an hour before ICE agents arrived, body cam footage shows. He was taken to the back of a waiting SUV to be transported to a detention facility. And then he slipped out of his handcuffs.
Video from the parking lot of the police station shows him walking away before agents accosted him. They scuffled, and the Rotterdam officers rushed to help subdue the escaping suspect. One used a taser.
“Yo tengo ID,” Garcia Rojas cried out in Spanish, meaning, “I have ID.” He later said he had immigration papers and a Social Security number, frantically repeating the plea as he was handcuffed again.
It took six officers to get him back into custody. Garcia Rojas told authorities that as a police officer in Nicaragua “he trained others on the use of defensive tactics,” according to federal prosecutors.
Garcia Rojas was charged with forcibly assaulting and resisting a federal agent. He was ordered detained on the charge at the Albany County jail while the case is pending. He declined a request for an interview, and his attorney declined to comment. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Duque-Muriel, 38, was also detained by Rotterdam officers and sent by ICE to a jail near Plattsburgh regarding her outstanding illegal entry case. A jail official said she is no longer in the facility; Duque-Muriel’s legal representative declined to comment.
She was one of dozens of migrants, mostly from Latin America and Africa, who were temporarily settled at the Super 8 Motel in Rotterdam starting in 2023, according to police records. Tens of thousands of migrants who came to New York City starting in 2022 overwhelmed the city’s traditional network of homeless shelters, prompting officials to create makeshift tent cities. They also briefly moved people to hotels in other parts of the state.
“They didn't even know where they were, and had never been up here in upstate New York – and they had nothing,” said Maria Pacheco, a retired teacher who gathered donations for the people brought to the hotel.
Pacheco said she didn’t specifically recall Duque-Muriel, but said people living in the hotel eventually relocated. The building was sold earlier this year. Duque-Muriel moved to Albany.
Duque-Muriel’s arrest in March also separated her from her child. Body camera footage captures an officer trying to console Duque-Muriel’s crying daughter in the backseat as he drives, telling her she would see her “mommy.” The girl was turned over to child protective services in Albany County.
When Gothamist visited Duque-Muriel’s apartment several weeks after her arrest, it was empty. Neighbors recalled that she and her child – as well as other people living in the ground-floor unit – moved away suddenly. An unopened notice from Albany County Family Court was wedged in the door.
Court records in Rotterdam show that neither Duque-Muriel nor Garcia Rojas showed up for their scheduled court date on the shoplifting charge.
A town judge signed warrants for their arrest.
