Three of the most senior Puerto Rican and Latino voices in Washington stood in a Santurce neighbourhood on Friday and said the United States' immigration enforcement agency should not be reformed but abolished. At a press conference at Casa Dominicana, in the Villa Palmeras sector of Santurce in San Juan, on November 6, US Representatives Nydia Velázquez of New York and Adriano Espaillat — chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — joined Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández in repudiating the ICE raids carried out across the island in late October and in backing the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a demand they tied to the Democratic victory in the US midterm legislative elections held on November 3.
Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 6, 2026
Espaillat, who like Velázquez was born outside the mainland United States — he in the Dominican Republic, she in Puerto Rico — said he had met Governor Jenniffer González after her election victory and that she had personally promised him the Puerto Rican government would not act as an agent of ICE. She “turned her back on that commitment,” he said. “What we have seen here in Barrio Obrero really has no name. It is unacceptable,” Espaillat said, referring to the Santurce sector at the centre of the October operations. “For me, as a Dominican, I feel particularly offended that these families fear going to a hospital, taking their children to a school, going to church on a Sunday or Saturday.”
Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 6, 2026
Velázquez: “We are going to take their masks off”
Velázquez, who is not returning to Congress in January after choosing not to seek re-election, said the change of power in Washington ends the current enforcement era: when the new Congress is inaugurated in January, “the abuse by ICE is over.” She listed measures that could not advance while Democrats were in the minority and that would now move: banning immigration agents from covering their faces with masks, requiring body cameras, and barring immigration agents by law from schools and churches. “We are going to take the masks off all those who have hidden behind them and behind their long guns. We are going to call to account those responsible for terrorizing communities in Santurce, in Río Piedras, in Cabo Rojo, and anywhere on this island,” she said, “those who dared to burst into a sacred place like the San Antonio de Padua Church in Río Piedras, in an unprecedented human hunt.”
Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 6, 2026
She went further in remarks carried by teleSUR: the agency “should not even be considered for reforms,” she argued — ICE “needs to be removed from the jurisdiction of Homeland Security and eliminated as an agency.” Espaillat, the first Dominican elected to the US Congress, who also leaves the House in January after losing his primary, echoed the demand, saying ICE “must be eliminated” because it is “completely out of control,” and criticising agents' use of long guns during the island operations.
Source: Venezuela Tribune (teleSUR), Nov. 7, 2026
What “abolish” would mean, in Hernández's telling
Hernández, Puerto Rico's sole representative in Congress and president of the Popular Democratic Party, struck a more measured note while endorsing the goal. “When we talk about abolishing, we are not talking about eliminating any kind of restrictions or immigration laws. It is transforming and changing how those laws are exercised so they are exercised humanely and responsibly,” he said. In his account, the replacement model would prohibit masks, require body cameras, protect sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals and churches, and end the display of long weapons in community operations; his office also plans to pursue congressional legislation on body cameras and protected public spaces, according to a summary of the appearance. On the separate fight over Puerto Rico's Senate Bill 1062 — the immigrant-student measure the Senate passed on Thursday — Hernández said he would study the final text before criticising his own party's senators, while stating his position plainly: “Zero ICE in the schools, in the hospitals, in the churches.”
Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 6, 2026
The raids that set this off
The enforcement wave ran from October 22 to 25 and was led by ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office in Miami, supported by Puerto Rican agents, El Nuevo Día reported. Operations were reported in Barrio Obrero and Villa Palmeras in Santurce, in the centre of Río Piedras — where agents entered the San Antonio de Padua church — and at a business in Canóvanas. Immigrant advocates said about a dozen workers, most of them Dominican, were detained in the sweep, and community organisations reported families afraid to leave home in the days that followed.
The lawmakers also revived the dispute over data. Espaillat pointed to the island government's handover of the personal data of more than 6,000 immigrants to the federal agency in January 2025: “I would not have handed that confidential information to a federal agency that shows up at schools, hospitals and churches essentially to deport,” he said. Velázquez put the figure at approximately 6,321 people and criticised the governor for agreeing to the transfer. The island's ACLU has said the data came from the Department of Transportation and Public Works' driver records. For balance, the governor herself criticised the manner of the most recent raids in earlier comments reported on October 31, saying the approach taken had not been necessary — a position the three lawmakers on Friday dismissed as insufficient given the government's cooperation with federal authorities.
Source: Venezuela Tribune (teleSUR), Nov. 7, 2026
Why Puerto Rico, and why now
Puerto Rico is a US territory: its residents are US citizens, but the island's immigrant communities — the largest from the Dominican Republic, roughly 60,000 people in a population of just over 3 million, according to the Puerto Rico Statistics Institute — live under the same federal immigration law as the mainland, enforced by the same agencies. That is why a neighbourhood press conference in Santurce carried national weight on Friday: the lawmakers were speaking in the community where the raids happened, days after voters handed their party control of Congress, and both Velázquez and Espaillat — two of the most prominent Latino members of the House — are spending some of their final weeks in office making the abolition of ICE a test of what the new majority does first.
Source: news.pr, Nov. 6, 2026
The three lawmakers said fear from the October raids is keeping immigrant families in Puerto Rico away from hospitals, schools and churches — the same “sensitive locations” that federal officials insist their agents respect, and the same places at the centre of the island's separate legislative fight over student protections.
What happens next
The new Congress is inaugurated in January, and the measures Velázquez listed — a statutory ban on masks, mandatory body cameras, and legal protection for schools and churches — are the first tests of whether “abolish ICE” becomes legislation or remains a slogan from the departing members who championed it. In Puerto Rico, the immediate fights are closer to home: whether the island government keeps sharing residents' data with federal immigration authorities, and whether the House of Representatives restores the school protections the Senate stripped from Bill 1062 this week. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security had not publicly answered the lawmakers' abolition demand in the reports of Friday's event; the HSI director in Puerto Rico said this week that schools, hospitals and churches remain “sensitive locations” her agents respect.