DENNIS — At 5 a.m. on March 4, eight federal agents converged on a house in Dennis Port where Roberto Jonathan Tejada, a 40-year-old Salvadoran, was asleep with his family. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations had come to arrest Tejada for re-entering the country illegally.
They had brought only an administrative warrant, and when they knocked, Tejada’s partner denied them permission to enter her home without a signed warrant from a judge. A standoff began that lasted more than 12 hours.
The family’s friends, schoolteachers, and immigrant-rights activists began to gather. By afternoon there were about 20 people at the scene, along with more than a dozen federal agents, according to Janet Emack and Anne Walsh of Brewster, volunteers with Building a Bigger Table, a committee of the Brewster Unitarian Universalist Church.
It was one of the first ICE raids on Cape Cod since President Trump returned to office.
Just before 6 p.m., Robert Piepiora, the supervising ICE agent, received a digital copy of a judicial arrest warrant signed by federal Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy.
Video footage obtained by the Independent shows Piepiora pressing his phone screen against a window to display the warrant to Tejada’s partner while ordering, “Open the door.” She took a photo of the phone and sent it to the people gathered outside but did not open the door.
Fifteen seconds after Piepiora’s command, agents used a battering ram to break down the door and entered the house with weapons drawn. They knocked Tejada’s partner to the ground and handcuffed her; she was taken by ambulance to Cape Cod Hospital that evening with chest pain, neck pain, a minor head injury, and bruises across her body, for which she was treated and discharged that night.
Tejada was in the attic, according to Piepiora’s testimony in federal district court on March 12. He had tied the attic door shut; when Tejada emerged, he tried to charge past six agents, Piepiora told the prosecutor.
“It was a scrum,” Piepiora said. “It took two individuals on each arm to place him into handcuffs.”
Emack had been on the phone with Tejada’s partner before the warrant arrived, explaining in Spanish the difference between administrative and judicial warrants. She said the agents had given Tejada’s partner almost no time to read the warrant before breaking down the door.
Ken Amoriggi, legal director of immigration services for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Fall River, told the Independent that judicial warrants are supposed to be on paper. “It’s pretty well settled that judicial warrants need to be presented in their original form,” he said. “That means the paper copy as signed by the judge.”
When it comes to immigration enforcement, “the ‘who’ has changed, the ‘how’ has changed, and the ‘why’ has changed,” said Hemanth Gundavaram, director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Northeastern University.
To Anne Walsh, the “where” was surprising, too. “We never dreamed that ICE would move on to Cape Cod,” she said.
Piepiora confirmed under cross-examination on March 12 that Tejada first saw a physical copy of the judicial warrant around 8 p.m., when he was booked at the Plymouth County jail — the only jail in the state that has a contract with ICE to hold people the agency is seeking to deport.
Tejada’s Record
According to court filings, ICE does not know when or where Tejada entered the U.S., but he applied for Temporary Protected Status, which is granted to people fleeing severe instability in their home countries, in November 2001, when he was not yet 18.
Tejada received Temporary Protected Status in 2002 and held that status until June 2008, shortly before he pled guilty to three felonies in Nantucket.
According to a series of reports in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, on Oct. 8, 2006 Tejada got into a dispute outside the Muse nightclub. A passenger in his car was punched through the car’s open window, and Tejada put his foot to the gas pedal and tried to strike the assailant with his vehicle. He missed, instead running over two bystanders and pinning a third between his vehicle and another car. Two victims suffered major head trauma and had to be taken by helicopter to Boston hospitals.
Tejada fled the scene, turned himself in the next day, and eventually pled guilty to three counts of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to two and a half years in the Barnstable County Jail: two 364-day sentences and a six-month sentence, served consecutively.
“The three sentences of each less than one year puts you in a better position” with immigration authorities, Nantucket Superior Court Judge Paul Chernoff said at Tejada’s sentencing. “That’s no guarantee the immigration authorities are going to act favorably, but I’m willing to try to put you in a position where it’s at least discretionary and not an automatic deportation.”
Tejada was married to a U.S. citizen and they had a child together, his lawyer had told the court.
ICE tried to deport Tejada after his release from jail, but he posted $10,000 bail and was contesting his deportation in court when he was arrested again in Boston in 2011.
Tejada was charged in Suffolk County Criminal Court with the statutory rape of a child: the 15-year-old daughter of a family friend. After two days of deliberating, on Feb. 3, 2012 a jury acquitted him of three counts of rape of a child and one count of indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or older. ICE took Tejada into custody that day, and he was deported in May 2013.
That deportation is the basis for his current charge in federal court: unlawful re-entry of a foreign alien, which is a felony.
Back to Cape Cod
Tejada’s wife filed for divorce shortly after he was deported, and Tejada started a new relationship in El Salvador, a friend of his family told the Independent. He had a daughter and ran a small shop there until gang violence, extortion, and death threats forced the family to flee, the friend said.
Tejada crossed back into the U.S. about eight years ago, followed by his daughter and wife, who was pregnant with their second child. They settled in Dennis Port about six years ago, where Tejada painted houses, as he had done on Nantucket.
Several people told the Independent that Tejada is a devoted father and hard worker. The agents who arrested him on March 4 repeatedly told the gathered friends, teachers, and activists that he was a rapist.
“They kept saying that over and over,” Emack said. “ ‘Do you know who this is? This is a rapist.’ ”
Four witnesses told the Independent that one of the agents told people gathered around the home that Tejada had raped his own children.
Piepiora told Judge Hennessy that he had arrived at the stakeout in Dennis Port around 4 p.m. and that federal agents had “possibly” discussed Tejada’s criminal record with members of the public. “I did not personally hear that,” he told the judge.
Rod MacDonald, an activist with the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, saw Tejada arrested in Dennis Port. “He was loudly protesting — I heard him say in English, ‘I did nothing. I did nothing,’ ” MacDonald said.
The federal agents had also put Tejada’s partner’s brother — who has both developmental and physical disabilities and was scheduled to have spinal surgery this month — in handcuffs and into a van around 10 a.m. on the day of the stakeout. He was in the van without food, water, or a bathroom break for almost 10 hours, Piepiora confirmed, while the agents tried to persuade Tejada to turn himself in to secure the brother’s release.
“We hadn’t targeted” the partner’s brother, Piepiora told Judge Hennessey on March 12. “Prior to the stop, we didn’t know anything about his status.” Piepiora said that ICE is now seeking to deport the brother.
At the detention hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Tobin argued that Tejada was a flight risk, citing his resistance to arrest and his supporters in the community, whom he called potential “accomplices.” Public defender Julie-Ann Olsen countered that Tejada had followed legal procedure and presented evidence of his community ties, including 11 letters of support.
Judge Hennessy acknowledged Tejada’s community ties but ruled against his release, calling him a “very significant flight risk.” Tejada remains in custody at Plymouth County Jail and stays in touch with his family by phone when possible.
“It’s truly instructive to see how this plays out,” said Emack. “It’s important for people to know what’s really happening.”
“It was unsettling, to say the least,” said former Dennis Selectman Wayne Bergeron, another activist with the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities. “These people are well known. They’re part of the neighborhood.
“We are just trying to make sure that people know their rights,” Bergeron said. “Even if they’re not citizens or documented here, they still have rights in our country.”
