Cottage Grove woman tells of being detained by ICE despite lawful status

Inside her store and down the street, the questions were pretty much the same: How are you doing?

“The pain goes away faster than the trauma,” Juanita Avila said in response to one well-wisher Thursday, Nov. 6, the day after video of her being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers showed her crying out while being held down on a Cottage Grove street.

In an interview, Avila — who’s had permanent resident status for a dozen years — tearfully described being violently yanked from her minivan at about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday after she tried to use her phone to record who had pulled her over.

She said she didn’t know who they were.

“He said, ‘We are police.’ And then I said, ‘No, you’re not police, because I know how the police look,’” said Avila, who has lived in Cottage Grove since January 2014.

While the man at her driver-side window did not have his face covered, others did. She thought they might be kidnappers.

Another man then said, “Where are you from?” Avila said she responded by saying, “Why are you asking me that? Why was I pulled over?”

That’s when a man told her she was arrested. She again asked why, then grabbed her phone to try to record while another person went to the passenger side “to open the door, but that door was locked.”

Someone grabbed her phone, and one of them “unlocked the door, and they dragged me out of my car and threw” her to the ground, said Avila, who is 4 feet 9 inches tall.

“I was so panicked and scared, because they didn’t identify themselves,” Avila said.

On the ground, “they put their knees on top of me, like three or four people on top on me, and they got my hands, and they pulled me so, so hard,” Avila said. Only then did they say they were immigration officers, Avila said.

Even then, she said she “couldn’t believe that was immigration.”

“If I don’t have any record and am legal to be here, why would they? Why?” Avila said. “Why were they hurting me, dragging me out of the car? Couldn’t they verify that first, before doing that?”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond to questions from Lookout Eugene-Springfield about why a person with lawful status was detained in Cottage Grove.

The helper needs help

In the small city of about 10,000, Avila is known as a helper. Originally from Guatemala, Avila, 47, serves as a translator and go-between for many Spanish-speaking residents in the city about 19 miles south of Springfield.

Helping someone out was why Avila hit the road Wednesday morning. She said she received an early morning phone call from the family of someone detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

In one of reportedly at least three similar ICE stops made that morning in Cottage Grove, someone had been arrested by ICE officers. Avila said in an interview the person who called asked for help in finding the vehicle left behind by the person arrested, so she left her home in search of it.

“But I didn’t see their car, so I was going back home,” Avila said.

Soon, she would be the person needing help. But before she knew what was to come, Avila, 47, on the phone with her 19-year-old daughter, Emely Agustin, told Emely she thought she was getting pulled over.

It was Emely who arrived to help her mother. Video posted on social media shows Emely yelling out her mother’s legal status, and, in an interview, she described trying to stay calm and continuing to explain her mother’s status to the officers.

And had she not arrived?

“I don’t even want to think about it. I really don’t,” Agustin said, wiping some tears of her own. “They probably would have taken her.”

In fact, her mother had her permanent residency identification in her pocket, but that wasn’t clear while she was being held in the back of the ICE vehicle. She remained handcuffed in the vehicle for close to a half-hour, Avila said.

Afterward, she made a trip to the hospital. An initial scan showed no major damage, but she expressed a worry about an injury to her left shoulder and said she also has pain “everywhere, like where they put their knees” to her back, she said.

Avila said she moved from Los Angeles in January 2014 “because it was not safe for my kids.” She settled in Cottage Grove where at first she worked in the fields, pruning and picking blueberries.

She opened her store in 2016, Juanita’s, which allowed her to spend more time with her family, and “I started getting stuff for the community, what they need,” Avila said. It’s where hard-to-find cooking spices can be found, as well as medicines, soccer jerseys, sweetbread and products pitched to the Latino community.

But now, in Cottage Grove, “everybody is just afraid,” Avila said.

She said she’s still afraid, and thinks she knows why she got pulled over in the first place.

“They probably thought that I had more people in the car because of that’s what they were doing, stopping people with minivans, with vans, with trucks going to work, like Hispanic-looking people,” Avila said.