Tag-Archive for » U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement «

17 criminal illegal aliens rounded up in area sweep

04
Sep 2012

Seventeen criminal aliens were arrested in a three-day operation across Prince George’s and Montgomery counties.

The 17 were considered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be the area’s criminal immigrants who posed the biggest threat to public safety or to national security.

“Maryland is safer today because there are 17 fewer criminal aliens in our neighborhoods,” said Calvin McCormick of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office in Baltimore.

Immigration officials vowed to send them back to their home countries, but only after some of them face criminal charges here.

From Tuesday to Thursday, federal agents and local law enforcement officers fanned the two counties and visited the homes of the targets.

The operation was not a job-site sweep. The targets are typically selected from a database of hundreds of thousands of fugitive aliens in the United States, officials said.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said federal statutes prohibited her from releasing the identities of suspects in administrative operations.

Those taken into custody included:

• A 22-year-old illegal alien from Mexico who was convicted in December of second-degree assault.

• A 44-year-old illegal alien from El Salvador with convictions in Prince George’s and Montgomery in the mid-1990s for theft and conspiracy to distribute narcotics. He was first deported in 1998.

All 17 were all adult males and all had prior criminal convictions. Six had previous assault convictions, three on drug distribution charges, two were found guilty on weapons counts, three had larceny convictions and one had multiple DUI convictions.

The 17 hailed from countries spanning the globe: the Bahamas, El Salvador, Mexico, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Nicaragua and Sierra Leone.

Two of the individuals will face further federal prosecution for re-entering the country illegally after a formal deportation and having serious criminal records. A conviction for felony re-entry carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

Those arrested with outstanding orders of removal will immediately be deported, while others will remain in ICE custody awaiting the outcomes of their cases.

Two of those arrested were also immigration fugitives who had previously been ordered to leave the country but failed to depart. Two others were illegal re-entrants who had been previously removed from the country, making their re-entry a federal felony offense.

The operation was conducted by the Baltimore Field Office, which covers all of Maryland. Since 2007, ICE has been conducting such “Cross Check” operations at various field offices around the country.

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Travis County sheriff’s immigration checks protested

04
Aug 2012

More than 50 people protested outside the Travis County sheriff’s office on Friday, calling on Sheriff Greg Hamilton to stop participating in a program that detains and deports illegal immigrants.

The protesters were aligned with a group of Austin-bound undocumented immigrants who are riding across parts of the nation in a bus to protest deportations.

“Sheriff Hamilton claims he has no choice, but the immigration holds are voluntary,” said Sarahi Uribe with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Uribe criticized a program called Secure Communities, which helps the federal government identify potential deportation targets by comparing fingerprints of people who have been booked on various charges against immigration databases. Uribe said participation in the program by local law enforcement officials is voluntary, citing information released after civil rights groups sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hamilton has said previously that participation is mandatory. Since Secure Communities was begun in Travis County in June 2009, more than 500 people have been deported. The county ranked third in May with a 41 percent deportation rate among 56 U.S. counties with at least 500 deportations through Secure Communities, according to an American-Statesman analysis.

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Officer Loses Bid to Check Immigration Status

31
Jul 2012

Houston Police Department policies barring officers from checking a person’s immigration status do not violate the constitutional rights of a sergeant whose husband was shot and killed in 2006 by an illegal immigrant, a federal judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner dismissed Sgt. Joslyn M. Johnson’s lawsuit against the city of Houston, the Houston Police Department and then-acting Police Chief Harold Hurtt.
While most lawsuits over municipal immigration policies challenge so-called “papers, please” provisions, Johnson argued that her department’s hands-off policies violated her free speech right to communicate with government agencies and hindered her from carrying out her responsibilities as a law enforcement officer.
Her husband, Officer Rodney Johnson, was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant during a routine traffic stop in 2006.
She claimed the department’s policies prevented her and other officers from checking with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the immigration status of people they stopped.
The department’s policies state: “Undocumented aliens status is not, in itself, a matter for local police action. Unlawful entry into the United States is not to be treated as an on-going offense occurring in the presence of a local police officer. Houston police officers may not stop or apprehend individuals solely on the belief that they are in this country illegally.
“Officers shall not make inquiries as to the citizenship status of any person, nor will officers detain or arrest persons solely on the belief that they are in this country illegally,” the policies state. “Officers will contact [ICE] regarding a person only if that person is arrested on a separate criminal charge (other than a class C misdemeanor) and the officer knows the prisoner is an illegal alien.”
Johnson claimed that, under these policies, officers could only check the “wanted” status of detainees in the National Crime Information Center database, and could only contact ICE if the check resulted in an immigration hit indicating the detainee had an outstanding ICE-issued warrant.
Johnson said she does not seek to detain or arrest people simply to check their immigration status, but would like to use her professional judgment to decide when to contact ICE about a person’s immigration status if she has reason to believe a crime may have been committed.
In his 44-page ruling, Hittner agreed with the city’s claim that Johnson’s contact with ICE would fall under her official duties as a police officer and is not protected by the First Amendment.
“In the present case, plaintiff’s allegations are replete with references to her professional judgment, her duties and responsibilities as a law enforcement officer, her oath to faithfully execute such duties and responsibilities, and her ability to contact ICE in her capacity as a law enforcement officer while ‘out on the street,’ during the course of carrying out her daily duties, and during legal detentions of those she lawfully encounters,” Hittner wrote.
“Thus, by plaintiff’s own pleadings, it is clear that her desired communications with ICE would necessarily owe their existence to her professional responsibilities as a law enforcement officer and that they would be made in the course of performing her official duties as a law enforcement officer.”
Hittner also disagreed with Johnson’s claim that the policies violated her right to inform federal officials of violations of federal law. He said she does not have the right as a law enforcement officer to conduct investigations of people she merely suspects of being in the country illegally.
“Plaintiff’s inherent right as a U.S. citizen to report federal law violations does not extend to an inherent right for plaintiff to use her capacity and professional judgment as a law enforcement officer to conduct investigations and ferret out whether individuals she encounters are illegal aliens,” Hittner wrote.
“Therefore, to the extent Plaintiff alleges the city’s policies infringe upon her inherent right to report violations of federal law, her pleadings fail to state a claim because the polices do not restrict such reporting.”

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US citizen sues federal government after being wrongly flagged as deportable immigrant under Secure Communities program

12
Jul 2012

A 25-year old Illinois man who says he was wrongly held in a maximum-security prison for two months after being incorrectly flagged by a controversial fingerprint-sharing system as a deportable immigrant is suing the federal government.

James Aziz Makowski, who was born in India but has been a U.S. citizen since he was 1 year old, says he wound up in prison instead of boot camp as punishment for a drug crime, all due to errors in the government’s fingerprint data-sharing system.

“It was one of the most sad and hopeless periods of times I’ve ever had,” he told msnbc.com on Tuesday.

Makowski, a former Marine who now works as a network engineer in downtown Chicago, is seeking unspecified damages from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security for, among other things, emotional distress and lost wages.

Makowski’s lawyers, Geoffrey Vance of McDermott Will & Emery and Mark Fleming, with the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center, say the lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Chicago, is the first to challenge the federal government’s controversial Secure Communities program.

Under the initiative, started by the Bush administration in 2008 and expanded to thousands of jurisdictions across the country under the Obama administration, federal agencies help local law enforcement identify and deport  illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, mainly though a fingerprint-sharing system.

Many social-justice and immigrant-rights advocates contend that the program is riddled with the potential for mistakes and that thousands of people who have no criminal records have been expelled.

According to court documents:

Makowski was born in Calcutta, India, and adopted by American parents when he was 1. He was issued a U.S. citizenship certificate in March 1989 and has been living continuously in the U.S. since then, leaving the country only once for a family vacation to England.

On July 7, 2010, Makowski was arrested in DuPage County, Ill., for selling heroin. He pleaded guilty to the felony charge in December 2010 and was sentenced to seven years in prison, but the judge said he could be released on parole if he successfully completed a 120-day “boot camp” drug-rehabilitation program.

After sentencing, Makowski was transferred to the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois for processing into the boot camp. But he was disqualified from the program after his name was flagged in a database and authorities issued a federal immigration detainer, even though he told an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent he was a U.S. citizen and showed his U.S. passport.

Instead of entering the boot camp, Makowski was sent to a maximum-security prison in Pontiac, Ill., where he spent two months until a lawyer hired by his father managed to convince the ICE office in Chicago to cancel the immigration hold. Makowski then completed the 120-day boot camp and was released in July 2011.

“I was in a maximum-security prison and I didn’t know why I was there other than the immigration detainer,” Makowski said in a telephone interview. “I just felt completely hopeless. I only ate once a day and stared at the ceiling all day. I stayed in my room 99 percent of time.”

Fleming, the attorney, said Makowski’s nightmare occurred because Homeland Security apparently never updated its records to reflect that Makowski is a U.S. citizen. He said the FBI’s practice of sharing fingerprints of U.S. citizens with ICE officials as part of the Secure Communities program violates federal privacy laws.

“The lesson to be learned is that there are certain U.S. citizens who are particularly vulnerable to being ensnared in this program. The federal government, in the interest of efficiency, has done short shrift to checks and balances,” Fleming said.

Amber Cargile, a spokeswoman for ICE, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

“To date, Secure Communities has helped ICE remove more than 147,400 convicted criminal aliens including more than 54,200 convicted of major violent offenses like murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children. Approximately 95 percent of the 198,000 removals generated through Secure Communities clearly fell within one of ICE’s enforcement priorities,” she said in a statement.

Cargile also noted that in December, ICE announced a new detainer form and the launch of a 24-hour, toll-free hotline – (855) 448-6903 – that detained individuals can call if they believe they are U.S. citizens or victims of a crime.

Makowski said he’s “confused and a little bit angry” at the government over his detention.

“I’m just hoping this lawsuit will help bring about change in the system,” he said. “Luckily my family had resources available … to help out, but I know there are plenty of individuals who don’t have those resources.”

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California Senate Passes “Anti-Arizona” Immigration Bill

07
Jul 2012

The California Senate passed a bill on Thursday that seeks to shield illegal immigrants from status checks by local police and challenges Republican-backed immigration crackdowns in Arizona and other U.S. states.

The Democrat-led state Senate voted 21 to 13 to approve the California Trust Act, dubbed by supporters as the “anti-Arizona” bill. It blocks local police from referring a detainee to immigration officials for deportation unless that person has been convicted of a violent or serious felony.

“Today’s vote signals to the nation that California cannot afford to be another Arizona,”Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a Democrat who sponsored the measure, said in a statement.

“The bill also limits unjust and onerous detentions for deportation in local jails of community members who do not pose a threat to public safety,” he added.

The bill has the backing of about 100 immigrant rights groups, police chiefs and mayors. It has already passed the Democrat-controlled state Assembly in a 47-26 vote and will go back to the Assembly for a concurrence vote following the summer recess before heading to Democratic Governor Jerry Brown.

California’s bill also seeks to push back against a federal program called Secure Communities, which supporters of Thursday’s bill say shares similar principles to Arizona’s law.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, established the Secure Communities program in partnership with local law enforcement agencies and the FBI to deport unauthorized immigrants.

Local authorities send fingerprints of those arrested to ICE, which says it prioritizes deporting those with criminal records. The program was credited as a factor in that agency’s nearly 400,000 deportations in 2011, its highest number ever.

The California State Sheriff’s Association, which opposes the bill approved on Thursday, could not immediately be reached for comment. It has said previously that state and local authorities cannot opt out of the Secure Communities program.

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