9. ‘Continuous monitoring’

Look up a Pacific County resident in the files of a data broker, and you’ll find that the more stable the life, the more the person tries to play by the rules, the easier he or she is to find. Even the arrest of a grandfather and 19-year U.S. resident named José Avila, whose disappearance was the next to shock the region after Díaz’s and Rodríguez’s, takes on a kind of machine logic if you see the available data. When I ran Avila’s name through a LexisNexis public-records product, I easily found up-to-date targeting information like the name of his mobile-home park. There were also email addresses: one from an account at EverydayFamily.com — you give the website your data in exchange for free samples of baby products — and one from when he or one of his sons hunted for budget medical schools at ValueMD.com. For almost two decades, Avila’s wife told me, she and her husband made a show of good faith by filing federal taxes. They used an ITIN, or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, in lieu of a Social Security number. This, too, made them trackable: One of ICE’s requirements for Thomson in its “continuous monitoring” system for the agency was that it “return information and addresses” from ITIN data.

Miller and Dietz got Avila early one Wednesday in August. “We’re probably going to be doing a vehicle stop,” Miller told the sheriff’s dispatcher, “but the individual doesn’t leave until a little closer to 6:00.” Avila swung out of the driveway in his pickup right on time, and they stopped him. As Sydney Stevens wrote in The Chinook Observer, they let him call one of his sons before confiscating his phone, and when the young man arrived, Avila was gone. His coffee was still warm, and his breakfast, wrapped in a paper towel upon which his youngest son had scrawled “DAD,” was uneaten.

I looked up Rosas in the same LexisNexis database. He has a thinner file. Though Officer Miller would later claim to have received a “public tip” calling Rosas a regular drug user — a charge that Rosas and people who know him strongly deny — he has no criminal record of any kind. His address on Bay Avenue is in the file because of a 2014 small-claims case against him for $1,823 in unpaid medical expenses. He had cut his hand on a bucket at work, he told me, and assumed that the emergency room bill had been paid through his employer’s workers’ compensation plan. Eventually, Rosas himself had to pay, and he also paid with his data when his address, taken from court records, made it into the machine.

That fall, the Seattle Times reporter Nina Shapiro, the same one to later reveal D.O.L.’s emails with ICE, came to Pacific County to write about the crackdown. For the agency, her article would be an unwelcome spotlight on its practices here — but also a new data point as it monitored a new target: Rosas. Unnamed in the article but quoted extensively and identified as Díaz’s boyfriend, he told Shapiro his family’s separation story, mentioning that his daughters were then in Mexico visiting their mother. To the deportation officers, this seems to have become a “tip indicating that the subject’s children had departed the United States,” as Dietz later wrote. And if Rosas was no longer caring for dependents, he was no longer protected from deportation.

ICE, later sued by activist groups in federal court for violating vocal immigrants’ First Amendment rights, including Rosas’, would deny wanting to punish him for talking to the press. “But, I mean, we do read the papers,” Elizabeth Godfrey told me, “so we knew his family situation had changed.”

At 12:31 p.m. on Oct. 2, 2017, high tide in Willapa Bay, just as the skies above the Long Beach Peninsula dried out and the wind began to blow, Officer Miller entered Rosas’ license plate into DAPS. Perhaps they had passed each other on the highway again. Perhaps they had just met again at Okie’s. Perhaps it was just Rosas’ time. The next day, at 11:52 a.m., Miller emailed the D.O.L. fraud office to request details about a person of interest. The man’s name is redacted in the documents I obtained, but he was born in Guerrero, Mexico, as Rosas was, and he first received a Washington driver’s license in the town of Union Gap, as Rosas did. He originally used a Mexican birth certificate and voter registration to prove his identity — as Miller and Dietz would later determine Rosas had done. “Please send me a copy of his first known application,” Miller wrote. “This subject is under federal investigation.” D.O.L. sent him the documents 12 minutes later. A month passed, and Shapiro’s article about Pacific County appeared in The Seattle Times. Seven days later, on Nov. 16, the deportation officers filled out a Field Operations Worksheet — and Rosas went from person of interest to approved target.