When ICE Comes to Your Town
By Raj Jayadev
New America Media & La Prensa de San Diego
SAN JOSE – Eloy, Ariz., is nothing like San Jose. More than a thousand miles away, placed in the middle of the desert, it is a blazingly hot, desolate and an unremarkable town, roughly an hour and a half south of Phoenix. It is so secluded that Greyhound doesn’t even go there.
Eloy is also host to one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, and for many is the last stop before deportation.
But now, a week after the largest immigration enforcement operation in California history, which brought in more than 1,000 people, and was a sort of coming out party for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s new San Jose Fugitive Operation Team, the distance from San Jose and Eloy already seems significantly shorter.
An estimated 436 people were arrested by ICE from the San Francisco Bay Area – many likely headed to Eloy – and immigrant communities here are on notice: they are in a new era of immigration enforcement, and ICE could be anywhere.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was established in 2003, as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. In order to expand ICE’s field efforts, it created Fugitive Operation Teams to locate, arrest and remove “fugitives” from the United States. ICE defines a fugitive as “an alien who has failed to report to a Detention and Removal Officer after receiving notice to do so.”
In 2003, there were eight Fugitive Operation Teams in the country. ICE now has 95 teams across the country, and expects to have more than 100 by the end of the year.
This year ICE is in the process of deploying teams in Birmingham, Ala., Columbus, Ohio, Charleston, S.C., Colorado Springs, Colo., Des Moines, Iowa, Fort Worth, Texas and two in New York City. In California, ICE is adding new teams in San Bernardino, San Diego, San Jose and Ventura County.
As of August, Fugitive Operations Teams have arrested 26,945 people this year. In 2003, they arrested less than 2,000.
http://www.laprensa-sandiego.org/current/ICE.101008.htm
