It was dawn when Noe Isaac Armas Hernandez, 48, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as he was taking a walk before his shift at a Santa Fe laundromat, near his midtown home.

“Two vehicles — one, a car with police lights. They surrounded him and arrested him,” a relative said.

The relative, whom The New Mexican is not naming because they don’t have legal residency status, told the story because they wanted to convey a message: “Immigration is in our neighborhoods. They are deporting our people.”

It’s unlikely ICE had a deportation order for Armas Hernandez — a native of El Salvador who does not appear to have a criminal record in New Mexico, according to a search of online court records — because he was “about half a block” away from his home on Declovina Street;

See Full Page