Hertz apologizes after refusing rental car to Puerto Rican customer
The US rental car giant Hertz has apologized and pledged to retrain its staff after an employee denied a Puerto Rican customer a prepaid vehicle on the mistaken belief that he was from a foreign country and needed a passport.
During the encounter with the customer at New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong international airport, the Hertz employee also called over a law enforcement officer who allegedly threatened to turn the man over to immigration authorities even though Puerto Rico has been a US territory since 1898 and has a representative in Congress as well, according to a stunning report which the CBS correspondent David Begnaud published on Twitter and Instagram late Saturday.
Humberto Marchand’s story, as told to Begnaud, vividly illustrated the prejudice many of the US’s 53 million Spanish speakers face.
Marchand recently traveled to New Orleans and ahead of his trip paid to rent a car from Hertz at the Armstrong airport. After arriving, he went to the Hertz counter and presented his Puerto Rican driver’s license, which contained text in two languages spoken on the island: Spanish and English.
The clerk there then purportedly said to him: “We will need a passport.” Marchand told Begnaud that after he asked the woman what she meant, she made remarks that suggested he was from another country and therefore needed a passport.
Marchand – a US citizen engaging in domestic travel – did not have his passport with him, so he urged Hertz to honor his reservation as he recorded video of the interaction with his cellphone. But the clerk refused.
“You’re denying me because I have a driver’s license which is a valid ID?” Marchand said in English, in an accent resembling that of many people from Puerto Rico. “It is a valid ID. It is a valid ID.”
Holding a clipboard and pen as she walked away, the woman turned around, pointed away, and four times said: “I need you to go about your business.”
Marchand replied: “It is a valid ID. It is a valid ID. It is a valid ID. It is a prepaid reservation.”
The woman then said, “Would you like me to call the police?” Marchand told her, “Yes, please, call the police.”
The woman pulled a cellphone out of one her pockets and called out an officer who told Marchand that he needed to leave. According to Marchand, as the officer then left, he threatened to “call border patrol” if the mistreated customer didn’t leave, too.
Marchand interpreted that as a remark that he was in the US illegally despite the fact that he is as much an American citizen as the Hertz clerk and the officer presumably are.
Begnaud also described Marchand as a “federal law enforcement officer of 25 years”. A LinkedIn profile under Marchand’s name said he worked as an assistant deputy chief, mental health specialist and officer in a US probation office before retiring.
The officer at the airport belonged to the police department patrolling Kenner, the suburban New Orleans city where the Armstrong airport is located. A spokesperson for the department said the agency reviewed the officer’s body-worn camera footage and didn’t hear a remark like the one described by Marchand.
But it’s unclear exactly when the officer turned off the body-worn camera after dealing with Hertz’s call, and Marchand insisted the border patrol remark happened, according to Begnaud, who received a similar statement from the police department for the city of Kenner. The Kenner police spokesperson invited Marchand to file a complaint with the agency, which in that case would investigate further.
Hertz didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. The company apologized to Marchand and issued him a refund immediately after being asked about his experience by Begnaud, whose Twitter and Instagram accounts are each followed by about 270,000 users.
“Hertz accepts Puerto Rican driver’s licenses from our customers renting in the US without requiring a valid passport,” the company said in a statement first sent to Begnaud and later provided to the Guardian. “We are reinforcing our policies with employees to ensure that they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.”
When asked about the employment status of the clerk who denied Marchand his reservation, a Hertz spokesperson told the Guardian that the employee “has been reminded of [the] standing policy related to Puerto Rican driver’s licenses”.
The US is home to the world’s second largest population of Spanish speakers despite English being the most common language. It trails only Mexico, a country of 127 million people whose official language is Spanish.