A soldier at Fort Hamilton Army base in Brooklyn, New York, called immigration officials on an illegal immigrant working as a pizza deliveryman, a report says.
Pablo Villavicencio, an Ecuadorean national, was taken into custody by ICE agents and now faces deportation, according to cable news station News 12 New Jersey.
Military police initially detained the 35-year-old alien because he could not produce a legal driver’s license as he tried to gain entrance to the military base to deliver the pizza. Villavicencio was held at Fort Hamilton until ICE agents arrived to take him into custody.
Villavicencio admitted that in 2010, he agreed to submit to “voluntary departure” as ruled by an immigration judge but never left. He is now married with two daughters, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
Sandra Chica, Villavicencio’s wife, claims her husband is facing “inhuman” treatment. “He was doing his job, he wasn’t committing a crime,” she insisted.
Chica also noted that her husband had applied for a green card last February and was still awaiting completion of the process.
Officials in New York City are incensed over the incident. In 2015, the liberal city created a policy to circumvent immigration laws and issued illegal immigrants a New York ID card, promising them this would be enough to keep them from being detained for their lack of identification.
“We are setting a dangerous precedent with what we saw here,” Democrat Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams complained.
“They [illegal aliens] were told with this ID, they would have some form of liberty in this city without being arrested,” Adams added.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.