Conflicting Accounts of an ICE Raid in Maryland
Officers Portray Detention of 24 Latinos Differently in Internal Probe and in Court
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; A01
The boss was not happy. His elite team of immigration officers had been raiding targets across Prince George's and Montgomery counties all night long in search of fugitive and criminal immigrants but had netted only a handful.
As the unit regrouped in its Baltimore office that frigid January morning two years ago, the supervisor warned members that they were well behind a Washington-mandated annual quota of 1,000 arrests per team and ordered them back out to boost their tally.
"I don't care where you get more arrests, we need more numbers," he said, according to one account in a summary of an internal investigation. The boss then added that the agents could go to any street corner and find a group of illegal immigrants, according to the summary, not previously made public.
About an hour later, the nine-person team went to a nearby 7-Eleven and arrested 24 Latino men. But most of the detainees were hardly the threats to the United States that the team was designed to focus on.
The officers were part of a special unit that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt suspected terrorists or dangerous criminals who are "fugitive aliens," meaning they have evaded a deportation order. And although many of the 24 Latinos detained at the 7-Eleven were found to have been in the country illegally, 14 were not fugitive immigrants. One, Ernesto Guillen, was merely stopping for coffee on his way to join his wife at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where their 4-year-old son was undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia.
The Jan. 23, 2007, incident, described in ICE documents and shown in security camera footage obtained by The Washington Post, offers a glimpse into how Washington's directives on arrest targets might have spurred officers in the field to stray from their mission and stage a random sweep for illegal immigrants, possibly in violation of ICE's stated practice.
Even as ICE's National Fugitive Operations Program has garnered more than $625 million from Congress since its launch in 2003, critics have long suspected that Washington's practice of setting goals for apprehensions has led teams to bring in tens of thousands of immigrants who have not evaded a deportation order or committed a crime -- as opposed to being in the country unlawfully, which is a civil violation.
Recently, researchers from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and the Migration Policy Institute in Washington released a report revealing a dramatic leap in arrests of immigrants who were neither fugitives nor criminals in 2006 and 2007 after officers were permitted to count non-fugitives toward their goal if such detainees were encountered in the course of an operation.
When a reporter contacted ICE for this article, spokeswoman Kelly A. Nantel disclosed that as of Feb. 4, ICE leadership had altered the annual goal of 1,000 arrests for each team. Instead, each team must now identify and target -- though not necessarily arrest -- 50 fugitives each month, as well as 500 a year as part of operations with other teams.
Nantel cited new statistics showing that in the 2008 fiscal year, the share of non-fugitive arrests by the teams dropped -- from 40 percent to 24 percent of arrests nationwide and to 6 percent of those made by the Baltimore team. Meanwhile, the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, has requested a review of fugitive operations.
Yet the aftermath of the 7-Eleven incident points to potential difficulties in changing ICE's institutional culture.
The initial account given by the agency, and supported in sworn declarations later made by some of the officers involved, was that the team had stopped at the 7-Eleven for a break when a group of Latino men approached, looking for day labor work. The officers said the men, when asked, voluntarily admitted to being in the country illegally, thus providing lawful grounds for their arrest.
But some of the officers and their colleagues later gave ICE investigators a different account. They described how, after their supervisor had instructed them to boost arrest numbers by arresting non-fugitives if necessary, they had stopped at the 7-Eleven for the express purpose of checking it for illegal immigrants. Moreover, security camera footage appears to show that at least eight of the Latino men arrested had no previous visible contact with the officers before they were detained.
The agency's internal probe -- launched at the request of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) -- was limited to the question of whether the officers had engaged in improper racial profiling and concluded on Oct. 9, 2007, that they had not. ICE has continued to stand by the initial declarations provided by its officers, submitting them in the detainee's deportation appeals as recently as Jan. 14.
Shortly after The Post contacted ICE about the incident, spokeswoman Nantel said Acting Assistant Secretary John P. Torres immediately asked the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether the officers' statements were inconsistent. The inspector general has not formally received the request. Nantel said Torres did not seek a further probe into the actions of the team's bosses.
"There's no conclusion in [the internal investigation report] that would indicate whether or not the supervisor gave any direction that they should go out and conduct random arrests," Nantel said. "There are accounts that say he did, and accounts that say he didn't."
Justin Cox, an attorney with CASA of Maryland, an immigrant rights group representing some of the detained men in both a civil claim and in immigration court, said ICE's response has been inadequate.
"Changing the arrest quotas alone is not going to make ICE more transparent or accountable," Cox said. "The officer on the street really has to be completely on board with the mission of the agency, because they have so much discretion to do whatever they want in situations where no one will ever really find out what happened." Only the security cameras and the discovery of ICE's internal documents, he said, made this situation different.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/02/17/ST2009021703780.html
