Judge throws out ICE Aspen deportation case

By Andrew Travers
Aspen Daily News
October 30, 2010

A Denver immigration judge recently threw out a deportation case against three allegedly undocumented foreign workers from Aspen, finding that federal immigration authorities illegally raided their Lazy Glen home in March of last year.

The raid on the three-story cabin, where nine adults and three children were staying, was conducted around 5:30 a.m. on March 24, 2009. Agents entered the house, woke up the residents in their bedrooms, yelling that there was an automobile accident outside and stating they were police. They then detained eight of the residents as illegal immigrants.

One man was immediately deported. The other seven have challenged the legality of the raid in immigration court, through Glenwood Springs attorney Ted Hess.

The raid was conducted by a Glenwood Springs-based U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) team, led by special agent Steve Turza.

In a 13-page ruling issued Oct. 21, Immigration Judge John W. Davis suppressed all collected evidence and dismissed the deportation cases against sisters Isabel and Citlali Guerrero, both housekeepers at the Aspen Square Condominium Hotel at the time of the raid, and Mario Alberto Soto-Gutierrez.

Judge Davis ruled that the warrantless, consentless raid was illegal.

Such rulings based on the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment are rare in immigration cases, and Hess said Friday that it was the first of its kind in Colorado.

Only if a search is found to be an “egregious” violation of search and seizure rights as defined in the Fourth Amendment, immigration judges have the authority to throw cases out.

“While interpretations of ‘egregiousness’ may vary,” Judge Davis wrote, “the decisions made by the ICE agents, particularly Special Agent Turza, who led the investigation, were beyond what a reasonable officer could or should have believed was lawful ... The court finds that the agents’ pre-dawn entry compiled with blatant misrepresentations to sleeping residents, conveying terrifying news of an accident is, in fact, egregious.”

Hess praised the judge’s ruling. “He could not in good conscience, uphold the raid,” Hess said.

Agent Turza testified that ICE received an anonymous tip in November 2008 that residents of the Lazy Glen cabin were in the U.S. illegally, and may have been involved in the theft of a television from the Aspen Square. The raid occurred five months later.

“The plan was simple: knock on the door and get consent to speak to the aliens,” Turza is quoted by the judge as testifying.

He testified that they conducted the operation in the pre-dawn hours because the residents were known to commute to work early in the morning. He said they did not get consent before entering because their knocks on the door went unanswered and his team feared the residents may have been poisoned by a carbon-monoxide leak, as an Aspen family had several months earlier.

The judge referred to this reasoning as a “ruse” and wrote that Turza also testified that the door was open when they arrived, which would diminish any possibility of a carbon monoxide problem.

“Generally,” Judge Davis wrote, “the Court found the agents’ testimony to be unreliable.”

Hess characterized it more bluntly: “This is one of the few times you will actually get an immigration judge saying that they [the ICE agents] lied.”

The judge wrote of the detainees: “All of the witnesses testified credibly that they were awoken in the pre-dawn hours and that the agents were identifying themselves as ‘police’ and yelling about an accident as they knocked on the various bedroom doors in the house.”

Citlali Guerrero testified at a July hearing in Denver that she had been sleeping in a room with her 5-year-old son when the ICE officers woke them. “The biggest mistreatment was psychological,” the judge quotes her as testifying.

As their deportation cases have proceeded, all seven local respondents have been released from detention facilities, either on immigration bonds or under ICE monitoring.

Hess said the Aspen area raid was part of an ongoing and largely unchecked trend of improper ICE operations, in which agents illegally enter homes, seize residents there who are not targets of the investigation, and then detain them based only on their racial or ethnic appearance. It was documented in a recent Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law study, titled, “Constitution on ICE.”

“They are just going freaking crazy,” Hess said, “and because this is a distinct and insular and disenfranchised minority, they are getting away with it ... I’m not going to go as far as calling them Nazis but these are Gestapo tactics. They are running roughshod over fundamental rights.”

Most cases of this kind do end in deportation, Hess said, because the individuals do not hire lawyers or fight the legality of such raids. “I was really happy when this particular group decided to stand up and resist,” he said.

A spokesman for ICE was reviewing Judge Davis’s ruling Friday, but did not respond with any comments before press time.

The deportation proceedings are still pending against four of the Lazy Glen residents. Hess is asking to have those cases dismissed under the same grounds as the case Judge Davis threw out. Those hearings are in court in on Apr. 25 and June 20, 2011.

http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/143412

Immigrant advocates dispute cause of police raid in South Nashville

By Brian Haas
THE TENNESSEAN
October 29, 2010

Immigrant rights groups on Thursday accused federal officials of violating the rights of dozens of people in a massive South Nashville immigration raid last week.

Except police say it wasn't an immigration raid.

Members of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union accused Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of violating people's civil rights on Oct. 20 during a raid at the Clairmont apartment complex.

Remziya Suleyman, policy coordinator for the immigration coalition, said the raid may have been retribution for complaints from residents about deplorable living conditions that included insects, vermin, mold, leaks and broken doors and windows.

"ICE came in — from the allegations that we heard — without consent, breaking into people's homes, breaking through windows and doors, dragging people out by gunpoint and in front of children," said Tricia Herzfeld, an attorney with the ACLU.

"This is not fair. We're a country of laws. Everyone has to follow them, including law enforcement."

But Metro police say the raid was not related to immigration issues.

Police say they were investigating suspected members of the MS-13 and SUR-13 gangs who were preying on undocumented workers.

Gang unit detectives and ICE agents watched four apartments for two weeks after requests from apartment managers.

They found two men who were wanted in connection with several robberies in the area, police spokesman Don Aaron said.

The Oct. 20 raid involved "knock and talks," Aaron said, meaning police knock on doors and try to spot fugitives as they talk to residents.

Aaron said police spotted at least three people they had identified as wanted gang members during the sweep.

In all, Aaron said, ICE made several arrests of wanted fugitives.

ICE officials Thursday said they were merely supporting the Metro Gang Unit but didn't address questions about the arrests.

"In this case, ICE's Fugitive Operations Team was assisting local law enforcement with field interviews of suspected street gang members and targeted ICE fugitives," said ICE spokesman Temple Black from the New Orleans field office.

The apartment's managers declined to comment, and their management company could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.
Several people detained

The ACLU and immigrant advocates had said that ICE detained a few dozen people in the raid, some of whom were denied access to attorneys.

"We are not aware of a single criminal charge that has resulted from this raid that terrorized all of these people," Herzfeld said. "There are between 20 and 40 people who are currently being held in immigration detention. Many of them have not been provided access to legal counsel."

Herzfeld said the ACLU was looking into possible litigation but that the groups were still investigating exactly what happened in the raid.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20101029/NEWS03/10290356/Immigrant-advocates-dispute-cause-of-police-raid-in-South-Nashville

"THEY TARGETED US FOR...OUR SKIN COLOR": Meeting to address raids; Immigration officials to be at town hall

By LYNNETTE CURTIS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
September 14, 2010
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Federal immigration officials will be in town tonight to answer questions about recent raids at valley bus stations that angered some in the Hispanic community.

Representatives from U.S. Customs and Border Protection -- which conducted the July 29 raids -- and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will participate in a 6 p.m. town hall meeting at the East Las Vegas Community Center, 250 N. Eastern Ave., near Stewart Avenue.

"We have a lot of questions and I'm hoping we can get some answers," said Michael Flores, an immigrant rights activist with ProgressNow Nevada.

The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., organized the meeting after hearing concerns from community members about tactics used during the raids.

Witnesses said Border Patrol agents didn't promptly identify themselves and refused to answer questions from owners and managers of the bus stations that were targeted.

Emmanuel Corrales, owner of Las Vegas Shuttles, said he and other U.S. citizens who were his clients were harassed by agents because of their ethnicity. The agents arrested one person from Corrales' business.

"I'm not upset about them taking illegal aliens," he told the Review-Journal earlier this month. "I'm upset I have to prove I'm a U.S. citizen in my own office. They targeted us for only one thing, our skin color."

Agents arrested a total of 31 suspected illegal immigrants during the raids, which began at the same time immigration rights groups had gathered at a local church to celebrate a judge's decision to block the most controversial sections of a new Arizona immigration law.

Twelve of those arrested had criminal histories that included charges of theft, prostitution and burglary, or immigration-related offenses, a Border Patrol spokesman said. Some of the 31 were taken to a Border Patrol station for processing. Others were released pending upcoming immigration hearing dates or were deported.

Agents were in Las Vegas as part of an operation "aimed at disrupting human smuggling activities at transportation sites that are used as a means to further illegal trafficking into the interior of the United States," the federal agency said.

Las Vegas has become a hub increasingly used by smuggling organizations to transport people and drugs, the agency said. Such organizations have been forced by stepped-up identification requirements at airports to use bus lines instead.

ICE also is participating to answer any questions that might arise about its own procedures, agency spokeswoman Virginia Kice said.

"Any time issues relating to immigration enforcement come up, there are related questions about our policies and procedures," she said.

Contact reporter Lynnette Curtis at lcurtis@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0285.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/meeting-to-address-raids-102842764.html

Most Mexican nationals arrested in '06 Bellingham raid have left U.S.; Feds still won't release names of arrestees

By SAM TAYLOR
The News Tribune
August 23rd, 2010

Nearly four years after the federal government raided a Bellingham business and arrested 26 alleged illegal immigrants, who they are remains a mystery to the public.

But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has finally provided basic details about what officials say are Mexican nationals who shouldn't have been in the country working at Northwest Health Care Linen. Most of them returned to Mexico - either voluntarily or by deportation - but the status of the other eight is unclear.

The lack of detail is a common back and forth debate between the media and federal officials, who spar over the right to information in a time when illegal immigration is at the forefront of national discourse.

At least one journalism advocacy group has called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement an extremely difficult organization to get information from, and that courts have been of little help to shine light on who is being arrested in immigration raids.

The local issue stems from an Aug. 30, 2006, immigration raid by ICE. At the time, officials refused to identify who had been arrested, saying they were "administrative arrests."

Homeland Security lawyers notified The Bellingham Herald in late July 2010 that a federal Freedom of Information Act request for the identities of those arrested - a request made Sept. 8, 2006 - was being finally and officially denied.

But after more questions from a reporter, Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa worked to provide more information, saying the records request was processed under a previous White House administration with different policies regarding requests.

There is information, Kudwa said, that could be released, but The Herald didn't ask for it. The previous policy would have been to respond only to the very specific information sought, she said.

The new administration, however, would work to provide related information that could be released.

Department officials have now provided the nationalities, ages, genders and immigration status of those who were arrested. No names will be provided, Kudwa said, because those are protected by federal privacy laws.

The details released still would not allow anyone to independently verify the status of the people arrested, if they're actually illegal immigrants, or if they're still in the country.

But they provide a snapshot into who was arrested that day, according to the federal government.

Sixteen women between the age of 20 and 50 who were citizens of Mexico were arrested. The majority returned to Mexico, either voluntarily or by deportation, the records indicate. One third of the women have not been deported, but it's unclear exactly where they are.

"Subject is out on bond and is not in ICE custody," the record say of one woman. The other five simply state "Subject is not in ICE custody."

Of the 10 men between the ages of 19 and 53 who were arrested that day, eight returned to Mexico, either voluntarily by deportation, according to Homeland Security. The other two are "not in ICE custody."

The federal government will not disclose to the media or the public what happens in immigration cases, said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"They're never going to tell you who they got, no matter what, no how," Dalglish said. "They're going to throw everything they can at you. They're going to deny it under FOIA, they're going to deny it under any law they can, particularly because these folks aren't U.S. residents."

Dalglish said the issue isn't only about holding immigrants accountable, it's about the federal government, as well.

"It's an abomination," she said. "It allows for no public oversight of the immigration process whatsoever. We have no idea what the federal government is doing to these people, and they're hiding under federal laws under the guise of 'We're trying to protect these people's privacy.' They don't give a rat's butt about these people."

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/08/20/1308623/feds-still-wont-release-names.html

Data Shows ICE Fails to Focus on Serious Crime

LA Progressive
by Michele Waslin
21 August 2010

In the past, IPC has reported on the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs and concerns that these partnerships between the federal and local governments have not succeeded in prioritizing serious criminals. New information sheds additional light on these programs and once again confirms that, despite pronouncements from ICE, they continue to identify, detain, and deport people who have not committed serious crimes and present no threat to our communities.

A new report from the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) examines the 287(g) program in Davidson County, TN. Between May 2006 and July 2007, the percentage of Hispanics arrested for driving without a license increased by more than 20% (from 23.3% to 49.4%) while the number of non-Hispanic defendants declined by 25%. Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall’s 287(g) Two-Year Review shows that 98% of immigrants processed for deportation were from Latin America and 85% of those processed through 287(g) were misdemeanor arrests. Despite ICE’s statements that 287(g) is meant to target serious criminals, Sheriff Hall called the program a success because it had resulted in the apprehension of more than 5,300 undocumented immigrants, of which only 1.3% were gang members, none were suspected terrorists, and 60% had not been previously arrested in Davidson County or anywhere else in the U.S.

NCLR recounts the stories of several people who were not convicted of any crimes and posed no threat, but were processed and deported through 287(g):

On January 27, 2008, Noe Lopez was arrested for fishing without a license along the Cumberland River in Davidson County and taken to the Davidson County jail, where he was screened under 287(g). Despite the fact that he was never found guilty of any crime, he was nonetheless deported.

Jose Estrada was standing outside the building where he worked, waiting for his boss to arrive, when he was approached by police and asked for identification. Even after Jose produced his Individual Taxpayer Identification card and his boss arrived to verify his identity, he was charged with possessing a fake Social Security card and transported to the Davidson County jail. Although the charge was dismissed in court and he posed no credible threat to the community, Jose was process for deportation.

New data has also emerged on the Secure Communities program. ICE recently released documents in response to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request from the National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitution Rights (CCR), and the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. These documents show that:

• 79% of the people deported through Secure Communities are non-criminals or were picked up for lower level offenses, such as traffic offenses.
• According to ICE’s data, since the program was initiated, 28% of the people transferred to ICE custody have been non-criminals.
• Thus far, in FY2010, 32% of individuals transferred to ICE custody have been non-criminals.

The documents also include some interesting data from individual jurisdictions:

• Nationwide, an average of 26% of all Secure Communities deportations are of non-criminals.
• In Maricopa County, AZ, 54% of people deported through Secure Communities are non-criminals.
• Travis County, TX has the highest percentage of non-criminal deportations. A full 82% of Secure Communities deportations are of non-criminals.
  

Congress has mandated that ICE prioritize the deportation of immigrants who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety, and those with criminal histories. But time after time, ICE statistics show that immigrants who haven’t been convicted of any crimes or immigrants with misdemeanor arrests make up a large percentage of deportations. It doesn’t seem like a very good way for the federal government or local jurisdictions to be spending limited resources.

http://www.laprogressive.com/immigration-reform/ice-fails-at-serious-crime/

Federal program leaves some local immigrants in danger of deportation

A federal program designed to send jailed immigrants back to their native lands has rounded up some in the Roanoke region who await the outcome of their hearings.
By Beth Macy
The Roanoke Times
August 14, 2010

Noe Avila and his wife, Miriam Ornelas Avila, live in Roanoke. Noe Avila was charged with writing a bad check and could be sent back to Mexico.

Noe Avila thought he was doing right by the law when he found an attorney to negotiate a deal with a Salem judge: He'd spend five days in jail in exchange for the dismissal of an old bad-check writing charge.

But once in jail, the 31-year-old construction foreman had a surprise visitor -- an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, based out of Salem's new ICE office.

In perfect English, Avila explained that he was in the process of getting a green card. That his wife is a permanent resident, and his 5- and 7-year-old kids are citizens, born in Roanoke. Avila himself has been here 10 years.

The agent responded by giving him a summons to appear in a federal immigration court in October -- where he will likely face deportation.

The summons was the result of a new federal program called Secure Communities, designed to deport jailed immigrants who are in the country illegally, especially felons and repeat offenders. Last year, Virginia became the second state in the nation to adopt the program.

Secure Communities has played a vital role in boosting deportations to record levels under the Obama administration. ICE expects to deport about 400,000 people this year, which is 25 percent more than in 2007.

Scheduled to cover the entire nation by 2013, the program has drawn less attention than Arizona's new immigration law -- and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's recent endorsement of it -- but it may end up making a bigger impact in terms of stemming the flow of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 10.8 million nationwide.

Critics say the program leads to racial profiling, exploitation of workers, the under-reporting of crime and -- as Avila's case demonstrates -- the breakup of families.

"They should rename the program Insecure Communities," said Tim Freilich, legal director of the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center's Immigrant Advocacy Program. "Secure Communities was supposed to be targeting violent criminals, but instead there are many hardworking immigrants who are getting swept up as well."

Avila fully expects to be deported to Mexico, leaving his wife and children behind. He doesn't want his family to join him there because of problems with schools, drugs and crime, and his children aren't fluent in Spanish.

"I believe bad apples and felons should be deported," he said. "But I was a church choir director. I play soccer, I don't drink or smoke, and I pay taxes -- and now I'm labeled a criminal because I don't have legal status."

'Notice to disappear'

Secure Communities has already identified 240,000 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, according to ICE. More than half the people removed this year have criminal convictions, from minor offenses such as driving without a license to major felonies.

"It's like having a virtual ICE presence in every local jail in Virginia now," said Richard Rocha, deputy press secretary for ICE in Washington. "We can ID people coming into local custody and then make prioritization decisions based on that information."

Top deportation targets are felons and aliens with egregious criminal histories. But agents may also target non-criminal offenders -- those hauled in on traffic violations, including people who don't have a valid Virginia driver's license.

Another common record blemish among ICE detainees is having an outstanding "notice to appear" in immigration court. Most migrants who were caught trying to cross the border during the U.S. government's "catch and release" era have such records.

Because of insufficient holding facilities, border-patrol agents would release the migrants with a summons to appear in deportation court, a practice that ended in 2006 and was widely referred to by migrants as a "notice to disappear."

Lesley Claros-Cedillo had such a notice on her record from 1999, when she journeyed from Honduras to join family members in Roanoke. Last summer, the 38-year-old woman with four children -- including a 7-month-old baby she was still nursing -- landed in jail after a traffic accident.

While the children were bounced between relatives, Claros-Cedillo became so distraught after spending weeks in detention that she signed away her rights to an immigration hearing -- and was sent back to Honduras.

A recent memorandum by ICE director John Morton advised that immigrants who are pregnant, nursing or seriously ill should not be placed in detention except in "extraordinary circumstances."

When a reporter asked Rocha about the case, he asked, "Do you know her history?" and recounted prior misdemeanor convictions for DUI and hit-and-run. Claros-Cedillo's family disputes the DUI, and no record of that charge could be found in area court records in Virginia.

"Also, what's important to know, at no time did she inform ICE officers that she was the sole care provider of the children," Rocha said.

ICE is committed "to smart and effective enforcement to focus on egregious criminal aliens who pose a threat," Rocha added.

Family friends say Claros-Cedillo didn't tell the agents about her children because she was afraid the older ones, who aren't legal residents, would be deported, too. The children are being raised in Roanoke now by relatives.

Police discretion

Can police jail an immigrant simply for residing illegally here without documentation? The answer varies depending upon whom you ask. It may even depend on that person's political views.

Acting Roanoke Police Chief Chris Perkins said the Fourth Amendment precludes officers from stopping motorists without reasonable suspicion of criminal involvement. Officers do have the right to arrest people driving without a license and bring them before the local magistrate -- but it's up to the discretion of the officer, who may also check for prior charges before deciding on an arrest.

"What I want to get across to Latinos and the community at large: The Roanoke Police Department does not have the authority to go out and actively look for illegal immigrants. But if they commit a crime -- and it can be a traffic infraction -- they can be put into the system," meaning their fingerprints will be cross-checked against the Secure Communities database, placing them at deportation risk.

Perkins met with Hispanic leaders recently to encourage them to tell illegal immigrants to carry legitimate identification, even if it's from the Mexican Consulate, which holds occasional documentation clinics in the region. People lacking identification are more likely to be arrested and jailed rather than ticketed. (Illegal immigrants have not been able to obtain a Virginia driver's license since January 2004.)

ICE won't release regional data, but numbers provided by the Roanoke Sheriff's Office showed 67 illegal immigrants were held in the jail in the past year. Of the 10 jailed during July, only one was held on a nonfelony crime, a driving-under-the-influence charge.

The Roanoke County Jail reports an average of 10 to 15 illegal immigrants jailed per month. "Right now we've got four undocumented in our jail," said Capt. Barry Tayloe, including two for DUI, one for violating a protective order and one for a DUI hit-and-run on Interstate 81 that resulted in the injury of a Florida family of four.

In the past six months, Salem immigration lawyer Christine Poarch has received dozens of calls from area immigrants worried about upcoming immigration hearings -- half of whom were jailed for traffic violations or driving without a license.

"I've only taken about 10 of those because my bright line is, I do not take cases if I can't provide relief in front of an immigration court," she said.

Clients may be eligible for relief if they've been in the United States 10 or more years, can demonstrate good moral character and have a citizen or legal permanent-resident relative who would suffer hardship because of their deportation. But Poarch worries about the cases that never make it to her desk. Many immigrants sign away their rights to an immigration hearing when the ICE agent visits them in jail.

"It's the equivalent of saying, 'Deport me now,' " Poarch explained.

Who's a danger?

Longtime courtroom interpreter Liana Arias said it's rare when jailed immigrants don't sign over their rights. "These people have a hard time understanding, and they don't believe they can say no to authority," said Arias, a native of Spain.

Such was the case when Dario Lopez was jailed in Roanoke last month on charges of assaulting a police officer and being drunk in public. In court last week, the charges were reduced to misdemeanor assault, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Family friend Richard Hamlett said he tried to bail him out of jail two weeks earlier, but was told that "ICE had placed a hold on him."

"The worst part was, he doesn't speak English enough to know what was happening to him," said Hamlett, a Roanoke County developer. "I've known him for three years -- he's a good kid. If I had done what he did, I'd be out of jail the next day."

Scheduled for deportation at the end of his sentence, Lopez will leave behind a wife and middle school-age son.

Randy Capps of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute believes Secure Communities leaves too much to the interpretation -- and politics -- of individual officers.

"Who do they consider to be a danger to the community? Police and ICE don't always agree on that definition," he said.

Everybody's confused and frustrated, Poarch said.

"Depending on what side you're coming from, either the feds haven't done anything with immigration reform or they haven't done enough with enforcement."

State Del. Tom Rust, R-Herndon, said his constituents are so frustrated about illegal immigration that last session he introduced two enforcement-related bills to the Virginia General Assembly, which were approved and took effect July 1. One allows local officers to arrest roadside day laborers soliciting work, and the other allows police to impound the cars of people who are being charged a second time for driving without a license.

Citizens are in an uproar over the recent death in Prince William County of the Catholic nun who was killed in a wreck with an illegal immigrant who had two prior DUI convictions on his record, Rust said.

"If the federal government can't do anything, they say, 'You do something.'

"Ultimately, the Supreme Court's going to settle the thing," he added, referring to the federally blocked Arizona law, currently being appealed by Gov. Jan Brewer. "But until then, or until the federal government enforces its own laws, we're going to be in this never-never land."

In the meantime, many area Hispanics say they are afraid to drive for fear of being pulled over, jailed and, ultimately, deported. Avila has friends who have shaved their moustaches and dyed their hair "because they don't want to be pulled over for 'driving brown.' "

Illegal immigrants who are victims or witnesses of crimes are not calling the police, fearing that they, too, will be jailed, he said.

'Basically American'

On a recent Friday, Miguel Angel was scanning the crowd at El Charly, a Roanoke Mexican restaurant and store, in search of a friendly face. He wanted to hitch a ride to work after lunch, and he had 20 minutes to get there, or risk being fired. (Angel is his middle name; he asked that his last name not be used.)

Angel, 22, said he was brought into the United States from Mexico by his parents at the age of 4. The family settled in Atlanta originally but moved to Roanoke a few years ago because they heard it was a friendlier place for illegal immigrants to live and work -- and had a minimal ICE presence.

But with the opening earlier this year of an ICE office in Salem and the introduction of Secure Communities, he's become too afraid to drive to his temp-agency landscaping job.

He says 30 of his friends have already been deported, and he fears he might be next if he risks exposure by driving without a license. Instead he does what the policeman told him to do the last time he was ticketed for it: He begs rides from family, friends and strangers.

"Sometimes I get frustrated and want to go back to Mexico, but I don't know nothing about Mexico," Angel said. "I mean, I been here almost my entire life. I think like an American. I talk like an American.

"I'm basically American."

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/256901

Lack of resources curtails ICE tracking of illegals; Agents told to 'prioritize'

By Jerry Seper
The Washington Times
August 8, 2010

New guidance telling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to focus on apprehending terrorists and criminals has many of ICE's rank-and-file agents wondering who then is responsible for tracking down and detaining the millions of other illegal border-crossers and fugitive aliens now in the country.

The new guidelines are outlined in a June 29 memo from Assistant Secretary John Morton, who heads the agency, to all ICE employees regarding the apprehension, detention and removal of illegal immigrants, noting that the agency "only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal-alien population in the United States."

Mr. Morton said ICE needed to focus wisely on the limited resources Congress had provided the agency and would "prioritize the apprehension and removal of aliens who only pose a threat to national security and/or public safety, such as criminals and terrorists."

"With this prioritization, we will ensure that our work has the greatest possible impact and most effectively advances our mission," Mr. Morton said, adding that the new guidelines were necessary "in light of the large number of administrative violations the agency is charged with addressing and the limited enforcement resources the agency has available."

Under the directive, ICE officials are authorized under a three-level priority system to use enforcement personnel, detention space and removal resources if they are assured that any deportations that do occur "promote ICE's highest enforcement priorities; namely, national security, public safety and border security."

Listed as the agency's top priority, according to the memo, are illegal immigrants who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety; those convicted of violent crimes, both felons and repeat offenders; those older than 16 who participated in organized criminal gangs; and those with outstanding criminal warrants.

Described in the memo as lesser priorities are foreign nationals caught crossing the border illegally or using phony immigration documents to gain entry, and those identified as fugitives after failing to show up for immigration or deportation hearings.

The agency's fiscal 2010 budget for detention and removal operations is $2.55 billion.

More than a dozen veteran ICE agents told The Washington Times in the past week that the carefully worded memo had field agents wondering whether they would be detaining illegal border-crossers in the future and whether those apprehended by other law enforcement agencies would be turned over to ICE for eventual deportation.

One high-ranking ICE official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the memo publicly, said agents at a major field office who inquired were told, "Arresting and deporting aliens was administrative work, and that as ICE criminal investigators, they were not going to do administrative duties."

According to the official, the agents were told that ICE criminal investigators would be involved only in high-profile drug and terrorism cases that involved the seizure of assets, and no longer would process illegal immigrants otherwise detained.

A March memo to field agents from Richard S. Curry, acting special agent in charge of the Las Vegas field office, seems to corroborate the official's account. It said, "We are criminal investigators and responsible for conducting complex, ICE-led criminal investigations that result in criminal arrests, indictments, convictions; as well as the seizure and subsequent forfeiture of assets.

"Midyear reviews are just around the corner and attached are the enforcement statistics by agents from Oct. 1, 2009, through March 3, 2010," the memo said. "While statistics alone are not the sole means utilized during year evaluations, they are an integral part of the process."

Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican, a member of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees who has steadfastly supported efforts at increasing the funding and manpower for enhanced security efforts at the nation's borders, said the Morton memo sends an "unfortunate message" to would-be illegal border-crossers.

"The message to those not yet in the United States is that they will get a free pass once they gain entry," he said.

But Mr. Poe, a former state judge and prosecutor, said ICE's failure to detain and deport the vast number of illegal immigrants apprehended in this country has been a longtime problem, notwithstanding the Morton memo. He said the agency historically has refused to pick up illegal immigrants detained by local, state and other federal agencies.

"It's the government's responsibility to find the resources to allow ICE to get the job done," Mr. Poe said. "Border security is a bipartisan issue, something that needs to be done and done properly. We need to find the resources to remove these people from the country. Congress can and should do it."

Lawmakers in a number of states — including Arizona — have sought to make illegal immigrants subject to arrest under state and local criminal-trespassing laws since ICE does not generally respond to pick up them up unless they are suspected to have committed a crime. This, they said, has led to overcrowding at a number of jail facilities and costs that have been prohibitive for many local and state agencies.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the new ICE guidelines demonstrated that despite promises from the Obama administration, it is "simply not serious about enforcing all of our immigration laws."

"The reason the Obama administration doesn't have the resources is because they don't want them," he said. "The Obama administration did not request a single new detention bed in their most recent budget request.

"So the limits on detention capacity that they now claim hold them back from further enforcement are of their own making," he said. "What's more, ICE is running under its average daily detention capacity — the Obama administration is not even using all the resources it has."

Mr. Smith said overall deportations are down and catch-and-release policies are back as illegal immigrants — even those with so-called minor criminal records such as drunken driving — are still being released into communities across the U.S.

"As we've seen too many times, these policies can have tragic consequences. And, illegal immigrants are still free on the streets to take jobs that should go to citizens and legal immigrants," he said. "It is commendable that ICE is focused on criminal aliens. But at the same time, the Obama administration is giving a free pass to any illegal immigrant who they decide is not dangerous enough."

The drunken-driving comment was in reference to a Virginia man suspected in a crash that killed a Catholic nun in Prince William County. The driver, Carlos Montano, has been identified as an illegal immigrant and repeat offender who was awaiting deportation and whom federal immigration authorities had released pending further proceedings.

Mr. Montano, charged with involuntary manslaughter and drunken driving, had been arrested two other times on drunken-driving charges. On at least one of those occasions, county police reported him to federal authorities.

The crash killed Sister Denise Mosier, 66, and injured two other nuns.

Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, said during the weekend that, in the wake of the crash, ICE officials will henceforth identify whether any person arrested in Prince William County is an illegal immigrant with a prior record. He also said the agency will provide more space in Virginia to detain illegal immigrants scheduled for deportation.

"It won't solve the problem, but it will help alleviate the problem," said a statement by Mr. Stewart, who has criticized the federal government's handling of the Montano case and has called for an Arizona-like immigration law in Virginia.

Mr. Montano would not have qualified for continued detention after his latest arrest under the new policy guidelines.

The Morton memo also said that while detention resources should be used to support "enforcement priorities," that absent "extraordinary circumstances" ICE agents should not spend resources apprehending, detaining or removing illegal immigrants with serious physical or mental illnesses; those who are disabled, elderly, pregnant or nursing; those who are primary caretakers of children or infirm persons; or those whose detention is "otherwise not in the public interest."

ICE detained more than 300,000 aliens last year and is engaged in what the agency has described as a "broad detention-reform effort." That effort includes the creation of a civil detention system that reduces transfers, maximizes access to counsel, visitation and recreation, improves conditions of confinement, and ensures quality medical, mental and dental health care.

Recognizing that the "purpose of immigration detention is not punitive and the importance of providing our detainees with quality care," ICE has said it has taken "concrete steps to improve the immigration-detention system and is engaged in a serious and sustained effort that will result in additional reforms and actions in the near future."

"Finite resources require ICE to prioritize our enforcement efforts to best protect the security of our communities and the integrity of the immigration system," ICE said in a statement.

In January, ICE reduced the number of its detention facilities from 341 to 270 and ended outside contracts at 10 other sites.

In March, Mr. Morton told the Senate Appropriations Committee that he intended to "change the jail-oriented approach of our current detention system, and am in the process of redesigning the system so it meets our needs as an agency that detains people for civil, not penal, purposes."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/8/lack-of-resources-curtails-ice-tracking-illegals/

ICE Raids U.S. Citizen

Carbondale Man Handcuffed, Threatened With Deportation
By Jaclyn Allen
ABC 7 News (Denver)
July 21, 2010

CARBONDALE, Colo. -- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents raided a Carbondale man's home and threatened to deport him last week.

The problem is, he is a U.S. Citizen.

"It was six in the morning, and I was still sleeping and I heard the knocking," said Marco Guevara.

When he opened the door, immigration agents quickly offered him a one-way ticket back to Ecuador.

"I was pretty sure they didn't want my family to know. They just wanted to take me in and make me disappear," said Guevara.

He said when he turned to call to his parents, he was tackled and handcuffed.

Carbondale police and sheriff's deputies teamed up with ICE agents last week for a series of gang sweeps. But in at least one case, their information was apparently wrong.

Guevara said he is a U.S. citizen with a valid U.S. passport which he's used to leave the country and return twice.

He said agents wouldn't listen to him, though, and his stepmother had to step in.

"I'm white. I speak fluent English," said Laurie Guevara-Stone. "There's just a lot of prejudice and racism and most people don't have someone like me in the house who can actually talk to these agents and make them calm down."

An ICE spokesman would not comment on the raid but released a statement to 7NEWS saying, "The ICE agent and sheriff's deputies on site acted appropriately and professionally. The incident is under investigation."

Brendan Greene with Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition said ICE agents "didn't have a leg to stand on."

"By act of law, if you're under the age of 18 when your parents become a citizen, you automatically become a citizen," said Greene.

He said Marco's father became a naturalized citizen in 2003 when Marco was 17.

"Unfortunately, it's something we see all too often with some of the ICE enforcement operations because of faulty databases that ICE uses to identify immigrants," said Greene. "In any other database a five to ten percent error rate would be unacceptable."

Guevara said the agents came to his home because they said he had a deportable offense -- a 2008 felony drug charge.

"I was hanging out with the wrong people," he said. "But I paid my fines, did my time, and never tried to justify it. I was held responsible for my actions."

Since then, he said he has found a job and been born again as a Christian. He said his favorite apostle, Paul, turned his life around, too.

"Just have faith and do the right thing, and you'll be alright," said Guevara.

Still, he said he lives in fear ICE will find something wrong with his papers and come knocking again.

"How many people have been deported, and then they could have been like, 'Oh, we made a mistake.' But who's going to bring them back? Who's going to help them out?" he said.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/24346394/detail.html

Feds acknowledge deportations followed Rio Vista traffic stop

By Nathan Salant
Solano County Buzz Examiner
July 3, 2010

Federal immigration authorities acknowledged Friday that two Latino cousins detained during a traffic stop in Rio Vista had been deported.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said the two men -- Joel and Jose Reyes -- were considered to be criminal aliens at the time of the stop and were subject to deportation.

"Joel Reyes and Jose Reyes advised ICE officers they were in the country illegally and signed documents agreeing to voluntarily return to their native countries in lieu of a hearing before an immigration judge," ICE public affairs officer Lori Haley said in a written statement.

Rio Vista Police Chief William Bowen said neither man had a driver's license and volunteered to the officer who pulled their car over that they were in the country illegally.

The two were arrested, and ICE officials were contacted and requested that both men be detained, according to The Reporter newspaper in Vacaville.

Bowen said his officer did the right thing by arresting the two men and contacting immigration officials. Bowen also rejected complaints by a Stockton attorney who said local police have no authority to question suspects' immigration status.

"I think the officer was very prudent," Bowen said. "I've been in this business a long time and I've learned that you just do what the federal government agencies tell you."

But the attorney, Hector Cavazos, who did not represent either suspect, told the newspaper that he believes the officer asked both men to verify their immigration status before arresting them.

"State and local authorities have no authority policing or enforcing immigration," he said. "As soon as they said they didn't have driver's licenses, they should have been told to leave. The inquiry should have stopped there."

But Bowen called the situation "difficult" and said he actually was surprised that ICE ordered the men deported.

He said that last October, a van with nine illegal immigrants was pulled over in Rio Vista and federal officials only wanted the driver arrested and deported. The other eight were released, Bowen said.

http://www.examiner.com/x-44830-Solano-County-Buzz-Examiner~y2010m7d3-rio-vista-deportations

ICE agents raid manufacturer in Fullerton

By GREG HARDESTY and CINDY CARCAMO
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
June 29, 2010

FULLERTON – Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided a manufacturing plant Tuesday morning and took 43 people into custody, officials said.

At about 8:30 a.m., ICE agents executed a federal search warrant at Terra Universal Inc. on South Raymond Avenue where they took a group of people into custody to be processed on suspected immigration violations, said Lori Haley, an ICE spokeswoman.

The 43 are suspected of being in the country illegally, she added.

The number could drop if ICE determines that some suspects should be released for humanitarian reasons such as medical issues, child or elder care issues, Haley said.

Because the search warrant is under seal and the raid is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, no other information was immediately available, Haley said.

Terra describes itself as a leading designer, builder and equipper of cleanrooms and laboratories since 1976.

An immigration lawyer for Terra decried the raid as overkill, saying it lead to a shutdown that cost the company $250,000 in lost business.

"This was like using a SWAT team to arrest a jaywalker," attorney David Ross said.

Terra employs about 150 at its administrative and manufacturing complex in Fullerton, which totals about 115,000 square feet.

According to Ross, about 30 armed ICE agents "invaded" the company and initially detained the entire workforce – "of which at least 100 are American citizens," he said.

Ross said the search warrant was limited to employment records, but that ICE agents shut down the entire company, including shipping, sales, engineering and marketing.

At one point, ICE agents shut down the phone and computer systems too, Ross said.

"All the agents had to do was check the employment records," Ross said.

The company is "assiduous" about hiring people who conform to the law, Ross said.

"Terra Universal completely complies with immigration law, and has done so for many years," he added.

Ross said he anticipates that most of the 43 people detained will be released.

http://www.ocregister.com/news/agents-255538-ice-plant.html?cb=1277861704

Rebranding at ICE meant to soften immigration enforcement agency's image

By Andrew Becker
The Washington Post
Thursday, June 17, 2010; B03

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will realign its duties to promote criminal investigations over immigrant deportation, officials have announced.

By streamlining and renaming several offices, officials hope to highlight the agency's counterterrorism, money laundering and other complex criminal investigations and in the process "re-brand" ICE, turning the public -- and political -- spotlight away from its immigration work.

ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton said that immigration enforcement remains a top priority but that the intention of the image makeover is to show the agency's "true face."

"Public perception is dominated by civil immigration enforcement responsibilities, even though half of the agency is devoted to something else," Morton said recently after announcing the changes to ICE employees. "We're not going to get away from immigration. It's very important from a national security perspective."

The realignment also aims to address ICE's identity crisis, which the agency has struggled with for years. Morton said in an e-mail to employees that one of his priorities "was to give a clearer sense of identity and focus."

The agency will have a new reporting alignment with three main directorates: investigations, immigration and management. ICE will consolidate its civil immigration duties into a new Enforcement and Removal Operations division. The office, formerly known as detention and removal operations, took the brunt of criticism.

Immigration advocates have expressed skepticism about an agency trying to rehabilitate its image without first making substantive changes. They say ICE is stricter than it was under the previous administration with enforcement, and problems persist with immigration detention. Most of the $5.5 billion in discretionary funds for ICE's 2011 budget request pays for efforts to lock up and deport immigrants.

"ICE has more than a branding problem. You can't rebrand yourself out of a misallocation of resources," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. Noorani hopes "ICE is doing stuff about stopping terrorists," he said, "but the public doesn't know about it. The public only knows ICE is going after immigrants."

Worksite raids and neighborhood sweeps that targeted illegal immigrants have helped shape ICE's image. The agency is hounded, too, by reports of poor treatment of noncitizens in ICE custody and allegations that the agency's rigid policies break up immigrant families. The agency has faced criticism over medical care for detainees, hiding the truth about deaths in detention and setting quotas for deportations.

In recent months, the White House has hosted several meetings with immigration advocates frustrated with ICE. The Obama administration has vowed to reform the nation's immigration detention system.

Efforts to overhaul the detention network, which locks up about 30,000 immigrants nightly in hundreds of federal, contract and local jails nationwide, have hit snags. Shortly after the reforms were announced last year, the first director of the new office to oversee the changes left the agency.

Moreover, there's a fundamental inconsistency as the administration pursues immigration reform while ICE still deports 1,100 people daily, said Marshall Fitz, director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress

"Obama is the face of promise and also the face of deportations," he said. "ICE can make all the policy changes they want at the headquarters level, but out in the field is a different story."

Liberals aren't alone in raising concerns. Conservatives and ICE's own agents have blasted the agency over immigration enforcement, saying that the agency isn't tough enough. They say the "realignment" signals a further shift in the Obama administration's approach to immigration.

"Far too much is at stake for ICE to neglect every tool at their disposal for the sake of rebranding their image," said Rep. Harold Rogers (Ky.), the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee for homeland security.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on the border, maritime and global counterterrorism, said ICE needs additional funding as more special agents are needed to investigate border crimes. About 20 percent of ICE's resources are dedicated to the border, Morton said.

But conservatives remain unsatisfied with such efforts, which have led to Arizona's controversial law SB1070 and calls for more Border Patrol agents. Obama has said he will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the border.

Morton said the realigned agency will continue to conduct criminal immigration investigations, such as worksite enforcement, national security and visa abuse.

But, according to the agency's 2011 congressional budget request, ICE projects that 80 percent of detained immigrants will be criminals, captured by fugitive teams or found in prisons and jails. The rest will primarily come from apprehensions of illegal border crossers. Last year, only 6 percent of the detainee population was booked by ICE's office of investigations.

To burnish the agency's image, ICE officials are considering a strategy that has helped the FBI for years: the aid of Hollywood and other venues of popular culture. Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, said such efforts could be squandered if internal problems aren't addressed.

"Public relations is such an important part of branding," he said. "They could go out and say 'we do all this cool stuff' with ad campaigns, and a Hollywood push, but if stories that come out don't support that, the rebranding program isn't going to work."

Andrew Becker is a reporter for the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/16/AR2010061605324.html

Deportation Nightmare: Eduardo Caraballo, US Citizen Born In Puerto Rico, Detained As Illegal Immigrant

The Huffington Post
May 25, 2010

Eduardo Caraballo, a U.S. citizen born in the United States, was detained for over three days on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

Despite presenting identifying documents and even his birth certificate, Caraballo was held by federal immigration authorities over the weekend and threatened with deportation, according to an NBC Chicago report. He was only released when his congressman, Luis Gutierrez -- a vocal supporter of immigration reform -- intervened on his behalf.

Caraballo was born in Puerto Rico, making him a natural-born citizen of the United States. He moved to the mainland as an infant, and now lives in Chicago.

Last week, NBC reports that he was arrested in connection with a stolen car in Berwyn. Caraballo maintains his innocence. In any case, when his mother posted bail on Friday, he was not freed.

"Instead of being released, he was told by authorities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was detaining him because he was an illegal immigrant," NBC reports.

Caraballo spent the weekend in the custody of federal immigration agents. When he presented them with ID and his birth certificate, he says officials were skeptical: "Because of the way I look, I have Mexican features, they pretty much assumed that my papers were fake."

Only after his congressman interceded was Caraballo set free.

Rep. Gutierrez, a Chicagoan who is himself of Puerto Rican descent, is a long-time advocate of immigration reform. He was one of the first and loudest voices on the Hill to speak out against the Arizona immigration law, and he was recently arrested at a protest demanding fairer treatment for immigrants and their families.

"It gets worse," Gutierrez said in an interview. "We know of instances in which young people in his same situation are actually taken to the border and deported from the United States.

Not surprisingly, the nine-term Democratic congressman saw a disturbing connection to the situation in the Grand Canyon State.

"In Arizona, they want everybody to be able to prove they're legally in the country. They want everybody to prove that they're an American citizen. Here we had an American citizen, that the federal government... could not determine, for more than three days, his status as an American citizen. It's very, very, very dangerous ground to tread."

According to NBC Chicago, Caraballo "is considering legal action." Meanwhile, he and his congressman hope the incident will open people's eyes to the dangers of profiling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/25/deportation-nightmare-edu_n_588788.html

Report: East Haven Police Target Latinos

By Thomas MacMillan
New Haven Independent
Apr 23, 2010

A week after the feds slammed the town’s police procedures, a damning new report prepared by Yale student attorneys indicates that East Haven police ticket Latino drivers at vastly disproportionate rates—then record them as white motorists, concealing the facts.

The new report, issued Thursday evening by Yale Law School students, states that over an eight-month period, nearly 60 percent of traffic tickets in East Haven involved Latino drivers. Yet police recorded the ethnicity of drivers as “Hispanic” in less than 5 percent of traffic tickets, according to the report. Read it here.

The Yale report follows just one week after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a letter to East Haven’s lawyer, stating that the department had found significant “areas of concern” in its investigation of policies at the East Haven police department. The Department of Justice has been looking into allegations—raised by a Fair Haven church—that East Haven police are engaged in harassment and abuse of Latinos.

East Haven business owners like Marcia Chacon (pictured) claim Latinos are subject to unwarranted traffic stops, harassment, and even violence at the hands of East Haven cops. Police have denied the charges.

The Department of Justice’s letter to East Haven listed seven different areas of concern, from inadequate oversight of officers’ use of force to a lack of a proper citizen complaint process. That letter prompted East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon to place police chief Len Gallo on administrative leave this week. He turned over his badge and gun on Wednesday. Read the letter here.

The police brass shake-up is the latest development in an ongoing story of alleged police harassment of Latinos just over New Haven’s border in East Haven—a border that separates not just towns, but two vastly different approaches to a growing local immigrant community.

The alleged ongoing harassment first came to light last year when a New Haven priest, Father James Manship, was arrested in an East Haven store while videotaping police who were allegedly harassing the storeowners. Click play to see his camera footage.

Manship Friday welcomed the traffic ticket report as quantitative proof that a problem exists, which will make it more difficult to ignore. “Now it’s some hard facts,” he said. “Are you going to keep saying we don’t have a problem here?”

Manship’s Fair Haven church, St. Rose of Lima, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice, which the department decided last December to investigate.

Last fall, as part of its own investigation into the East Haven Police Department, St. Rose of Lima requested to see records of traffic tickets issued by police on Main Street and Route 80 between June 1, 2008 and Feb. 28, 2009. Those tickets were analyzed by Yale student attorneys assisting St. Rose, resulting in Thursday’s report.

The East Haven Police Department did not turn over all the information requested by St. Rose of Lima. That failure is the subject of an ongoing Freedom of Information case.

In the newly released study, Yale students compared the names on the traffic tickets to lists of Hispanic names, including a list developed by the U.S. Census. The students then determined that 56.3 percent of traffic tickets in the eight-month period were issued to Hispanics. This is significant in a town with a Hispanic population of just 5.8 percent, the report states.

Yale students then compared their analysis of the ethnicity of drivers with the ethnicities reported by East Haven police. They found that police “failed to correctly identify the race of vast majority of individuals to whom they issued traffic tickets.” Police reported giving tickets mostly to white people. Police recorded Hispanic drivers for only 4.8 percent of tickets, according to the report.

An accompanying graph shows that one officer in particular, Dennis Spaulding, is responsible for 97 tickets issued to people with Hispanic names. Another graph shows that Spaulding reported issuing 120 tickets to white people, four to black people, and none to Hispanic drivers in the same period. Spaulding has been accused by name of racial harassment by Latino business owners.

Another graph shows that Hispanic drivers on average received higher fines following traffic stops than other ethnicities.

One section of the report states that traffic tickets were issued more proportionally by ethnicity when East Haven police were engaged in “Click It or Ticket,” a national program of seatbelt enforcement checkpoints. East Haven police stopped only five Hispanics and 35 white people at such checkpoints. The report suggests that since Click It or Ticket is a national program, “the pattern of discriminatory enforcement dissipates when the EHPD is operating under state and/or federal guidelines.”

In conclusion, the report states that the disproportionate level of traffic stops involving Hispanics, provides “indirect support” for allegations of racial harassment and abuse. Combined with the improper recording of ethnicities, the findings “may suggest EHPD officers lack the training and supervision they need to fairly enforce the law,” the report states.

Tafari Lumumba, a student attorney working on the case, said the report will be sent to the Department of Justice, “to supplement their investigation.”

The ultimate goal is to “change the culture of the department,” Lumumba said. Chief Gallo’s administrative leave is a “good first step,” but the policing problems in East Haven are department-wide.

“It’s not just one or two bad apples,” Lumumba said.

Meanwhile, police harassment continues in East Haven, Lumumba said. He and the rest of the legal team still receive phone calls every week from people complaining about the use of racial slurs by police, or reports of police “putting their hands on people.”

“Not much has truly changed,” Lumumba said.

“As recently as Sunday night, somebody else was accosted and threatened,” Manship said.

From the beginning, St. Rose of Lima has been trying to document what has been happening in East Haven, Manship said. “But we’ve been told by town officials that it’s not happening.”

On Friday afternoon, Chacon was behind the counter of her Main Street business, My Country Store. She said the policing situation has improved recently. “People still tell me they are stopped for no reason,” she said. “Some people are still afraid.”

The ouster of Chief Gallo is a sign of justice, Chacon said. But more needs to be done. New regulations need to be implemented at the police department, she said.

Asked for comment about the traffic tickets report, Mayor Almon’s office emailed a statement released after the mayor ordered Chief Gallo to administrative leave:

“Department of Justice has noted a complete lack of training, guidelines, oversight and supervision in a number of critical areas. The question now is; has there been a complete lack of leadership in these critical areas? At the end of the day my concern is how to prevent this from exposing the town to liability which would ultimately cost taxpayers’ money.”

http://newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/report_tickets_show_east_haven_targets_latinos/id_25588

Deportation memo spurs call for top immigration official's firing

Activists are furious about a leaked government memo calling for more deportations of undocumented immigrants.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
The Miami Herald
March 31, 2010

A leaked memo about the Obama administration's strategy in deporting undocumented immigrants has outraged immigrant right activists who want the president to fire a top immigration official.

The activists, including two from South Florida, demanded the dismissal Tuesday of John Morton, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"He must fire Morton now," said María Rodríguez of Florida Immigrant Coalition, one of several immigrant rights activists who spoke during a conference call with reporters arranged by Washington-based Fair Immigration Reform Movement on Tuesday.

Jonathan Fried, head of WeCount! in Homestead, joined the effort to remove Morton when he spoke to El Nuevo Herald during a telephone interview after the conference call.

He cited the case of a south Miami-Dade Mexican mother -- with two U.S.-born children -- who was deported a few months ago after being stopped by the police for not having a driver's license. "She had no criminal record," he said.

The memo, authored by James M. Chaparro, director of ICE's Detention and Removal Operations, complained about dwindling noncriminal deportations and outlined new goals for ICE agents charged with apprehending undocumented immigrants in order to boost the number of deportations.

News of the memo was first reported by The Washington Post and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Activists are furious because the memo contradicts ICE's strategy shift under Obama to go after foreign convicts while deemphasizing work-site raids and arrests of undocumented foreign nationals with no criminal records.

ICE officials have since issued a statement saying that portions of the memo published by The Washington Post ``did not reflect our policies'' and were corrected or withdrawn.

"We are strongly committed to carrying out our priorities to remove serious criminal offenders first and we definitively do not set quotas," the statement said.

Though Morton withdrew the Chaparro memo, activists remain unconvinced ICE will stop going after undocumented immigrants with no criminal records.

ICE officials, for their part, are mum on calls for Morton's dismissal.

"We are declining comment," Brian P. Hale, ICE's public affairs director, told El Nuevo Herald.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/31/1555963/deportation-memo-spurs-call-for.html#ixzz0jr6BoecD

Border Patrol Backtracks on Teenagers’ Deportation, Brings Them Back to U.S.

By Valeria Fernández
Feet in 2 Worlds
February 11, 2010

PHOENIX, Arizona — When Oscar Valenzuela, 18, was driving home after picking up his brother Abel Castellón, 15, at a school soccer game, an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol resulted in their deportation the following morning.

However, as quickly as the teenagers were deported, authorities brought them back.

Most immigration attorneys agree that the undoing of their deportation was a rare occurrence and advocates argue their case is a testimony of the perils and challenges faced by undocumented youth raised in the U.S.

“I never thought that I was going to get deported,” said Abel, who speaks English with no hint of a Spanish accent. Abel was used to seeing the white and green Border Patrol cars on the road on his way back home on the school bus. His family lives near the town of Casa Grande, where the agency has a station.

The brothers entered the country when they were four and one years old. Abel has no recollection of ever crossing the border.

Their encounter with the Border Patrol began late in the evening of January 11, on their way back from a soccer tournament at Vista Grande High School, which Abel attends. Oscar was behind the wheel as he passed a Border Patrol vehicle on the side of the road. The agents began to follow them, he said.

After about three minutes, an agent pulled them over and told them they were speeding, which Oscar argues wasn’t the case. Both brothers gave him their school identifications.

“He said we had no social security number and that he had to deport us,” said Oscar. “’Are you sure you are going to deport us?’ I asked. And he said: ‘Yes, I’m going to deport you.’”

Shortly thereafter, they were deported.

“They were trying to make us sign paperwork for our voluntary removal in Spanish but we wouldn’t,” said Oscar. The brothers were transported to the Tucson Border Patrol station – about two hours from the border.

The following morning, they were ushered into a bus with other detainees and dropped across the border at noon at the Nogales, Sonora, port of entry. Oscar and Abel had never been in the border city, where violence has escalated over the last couple of years.

“My brother Abel was scared. I didn’t even know how to use pesos,” he said.

The night before, their mother Ana Hernández had received a desperate phone call from Oscar.

“He told me: ‘Mom, they gave us dinner. And they say they will deport us.’ It was horrible, I don’t wish this on anyone,” she said.

The following morning the Mexican Consulate in Tucson told her her sons had been deported and nothing else could be done. But after a Feet in Two Worlds reporter requested information on the circumstances of the teenagers’ removal on January 13, the consulate received a call from the Border Patrol.

Jacobo Tellez, a Mexican officer in charge of the Department of Protection at the Tucson Mexican Consulate, said the Border Patrol contacted him to say there had been an “error” in the youngsters’ removal. He said they shouldn’t have been deported if they didn’t sign a voluntary removal form; instead, they should have been sent before an immigration judge. Tellez helped locate Oscar and Abel, who had a cell phone with them and were staying at a hotel in Nogales.

Soon, a BP agent and a Mexican official picked them up near the border crossing. The kids were handcuffed and driven home in the back of a small border patrol truck used to carry detainees.

Oscar and Abel were surprised. “They drove us home really fast,” Oscar said.

Tucson Border Patrol spokesman Mario Escalante said the boys “were inadvertently given a voluntary return” and they were reunited with their family thanks to the collaboration with Mexican consular authorities.

“There was an error made and an investigation will take place,” he wrote. Escalante said that a migrant return to the U.S. is possible and happens mostly when the Border Patrol discovers that it wrongfully deported a Central American migrant to Mexico.

Tellez said that Mexico has treaties in place with the United States for the repatriation of minors. Typically, the consulate is contacted before a minor is repatriated and often, if the parents live in the U.S., they are given custody of the minor while he or she awaits a removal proceeding.

In this case, Abel, 15, wasn’t considered a minor because he was with Oscar, a family member, according to the Border Patrol.

Pastor Magdalena Schwartz, from the Disciples of the Kingdom Free United Methodist Church, says she sees similar situations often.

“Many people bring their children when they are really young, sometimes three years old, sometimes months old. And (the children) believe they’re from the U.S. and they act as if they were from here,” she said. “So when things like these happen, they wake up to reality an realize they’re not really from here, and they’re without documents.”

Schwartz said that the main concern in these situations is that children are being deported across a dangerous border to a place they don’t know, where they could become the victims of smugglers and kidnappers.

“I’m glad they corrected the mistake,” she said. “But what about the cases we never hear about, because the parents are afraid to speak up because they’re undocumented?”

Marianne Gonko, the teenagers’ immigration attorney, said their case was odd. That’s why, she said, she wasn’t surprised that the Border Patrol acted to correct it immediately.

“I’ve never heard of a minor being deported so quickly,” she said.

But what is rare is for the Border Patrol to admit they made a mistake, said Phoenix-based immigration attorney Kevin Gibbons.

“It is difficult to get something reversed,” he said.

Gibbons is familiar with cases in which U.S. citizens are deported by mistake and even they have to wait — sometimes for months — to return to their country once they can prove their citizenship.

Part of the problem is that at the border, immigration agents are acting as “judges” that have to make a quick decision as to whether or not a person has a claim as a refugee or has family ties to stay in the country, he said. Sometimes undocumented immigrants are also pressured to sign a voluntary removal, Gonko said.

Schwartz argues that Abel and Oscar’s case was handled differently because there’s been a shift in the way immigration authorities are working under the Obama administration.

“I think this administration is being more compassionate and benevolent,” she said.

The boys’ future in the U.S. is still in limbo.

Gonko, their immigration attorney, said they currently have to report to immigration authorities monthly and she will fight against their removal from the country. She added that they would be perfect candidates for the DREAM Act, a bill that would allow undocumented students to legalize their immigration status. But its possibilities in Washington D.C., as well of those of immigration reform, are uncertain for this year.

Oscar said they shouldn’t have been deported in the first place.

“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” he said. “Just coming back from a soccer game.”

http://news.feetintwoworlds.org/2010/02/11/border-patrol-backtracks-on-teenagers%E2%80%99-deportation-brings-them-back-to-u-s/

Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

By NINA BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
January 10, 2010

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

The Nation: Immigration Agents Holding US Residents in Unlisted, Unmarked Facilities

Democracy Now
December 24, 2009

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding an untold number of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the United States. That’s according to an explosive report that’s the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine. They also report that ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other illegal tricks to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. We speak with the author of the two-part investigation, Jacqueline Stevens. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Jacqueline Stevens, professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the recently published book States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D - AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, is holding an untold number of people in secret detention facilities all over the United States. That’s according to an explosive report that’s the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

In addition to its publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is holding people in 186 unlisted and unmarked spaces known as sub-field offices. Many of the offices are hidden in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants. According the report in The Nation, they are mainly used to house individuals in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE detainees.

The Nation is also reporting that ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other illegal tricks to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. ICE agents have posed as Occupational Safety and Health inspectors, insurance agents, and even religious workers.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited ICE to respond to the allegations, but they refused to comment on any aspect of The Nation‘s investigation. In a telephone call with Democracy Now!, a spokesperson from ICE’s Office of Public Affairs simply described the articles as, quote, “conspiratorial nonsense” and “fiction.”

For more on this story, we’re joined here in New York by the author of this two-part investigation, Jacqueline Stevens. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a partial list of the sub-field offices. Her articles are available at thenation.com, the latest issue of The Nation magazine, as well. They’re called “America’s Secret ICE Castles” and “ICE Agents Ruse Operations.” Jacqueline Stevens is a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And her new book is called States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: OK. So, I found that there are 186 ICE sub-field offices that are scattered around the country and that are designed, according to ICE’s own reports by Dr. Dora Schriro, to hold people on a temporary basis, typically for no more than sixteen hours. And the problem with these is that they’re not marked, they’re not—information about their whereabouts is not publicly available, and there’s no accountability for the treatment of people who are held in those facilities.

I am not making any claims about a conspiracy. I’m not making any claims about the intentions behind, you know, not having these offices marked or the information publicly available, so that’s a very surprising claim on their part. I’m simply noting that, according to their own records, there are 186 sub-field offices, and their locations are not publicly available.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And were you able to get a sense of the capacity, in terms of the numbers of people that they’re holding, and for how long they end up actually being held?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Yeah. Well, their own report says that about 910 people a day are held in these facilities, and that amounts to about 340,000 people a year who are going through these facilities. And that’s their data. So I have no idea why they’re claiming that that’s not true. I mean, that’s their report.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how immigrants are picked up.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So, there’s a number of ways that immigrants can be picked up. The majority of people are picked up through something called a Criminal Alien Program. And that might suggest that most of the people being picked up are criminal aliens, but again, according to ICE’s own statistics, among the 48 percent of people who are picked up through the Criminal Alien Program, 57 percent are not criminals. And this is—the number has actually gone up. So, in 2008, 53 percent of the people who were picked up through the Criminal Alien Program were not criminals. These Criminal Alien Program offices are typically in these ICE sub-field locations.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when they say Criminal Alien Program, they’re talking about people who may have been previously convicted of a crime, who they were trying to deport—to pick up and deport? Or are they talking about people who are actually wanted criminals?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So, it’s typically people who are already booked in jails or in prisons and there’s some indication that they are foreign-born. And those records then come to the attention of the Criminal Alien Program. So they might not even be charged with anything. Their arrests could be pretenses for bringing them into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the part of local law enforcement. And that’s a pattern that has occurred and been noted frequently in the South, where local police will pick people up on pretextual violations, not charge them with crimes, and bring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices through the Criminal Alien Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stevens, you quote James Pendergraph, an ICE official, speaking at a conference last year, saying, “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but” you know—“you think he’s illegal, we can make [him] disappear.”

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What is he talking about?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So he’s talking about the facilities that ICE makes available through not just these sub-field offices—and just to be clear, you know, the vast majority of detainees who are held are not held on a long-term basis in these sub-field offices. They are held in about 300 jails and ICE-run detention facilities across the country. And so, what he’s talking about is the ability of ICE to distribute people among these facilities, and the typical system that governs the organization of detainee records would mean that it would be very difficult for anybody to locate the whereabouts of the people they pick up.

AMY GOODMAN: Are family members notified when someone is arrested?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: No, they’re not notified. And not only are they not notified, even when they make very diligent efforts to locate their relatives, they meet obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And, you know, the phones don’t get answered. When they do get answered, people are non-responsive.

AMY GOODMAN: So they don’t know if they’ve been killed on the street or something.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: No, no, no, there’s no information that’s made available. And ICE doesn’t dispute that. ICE claims that it’s not their position to find—you know, to locate people, that it’s not their responsibility to even notify attorneys when their clients are transferred from one facility to another facility. They’re on record stating that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the whole issue of how many of these people are picked up, the question of ICE agents impersonating, in some cases, Mormon missionaries, you write about, or insurance agents. Could you—how does that work?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: OK. So, one consequence of the detention operations and the removal operations moving away from these big workplace raids—that is something that the Obama administration has, you know, dedicated itself to—has been more surreptitious operations, and an increase in those. I mean, these have been going on under the Bush administration, as well, but there’s an impression that there’s been a shift to these more surreptitious operations for targeting people.

And among the operations that I encountered, and ICE calls these “ruse operations”—and just to be clear, under our law, ruse operations, for the most part, are legal. It is legal for, you know, federal agents to impersonate civilians for the purpose of tricking people who they suspect have arrest warrants and so forth in obtaining their custody.

It is not legal for federal agents to impersonate religious workers. And a spokesperson for the ACLU explained why, and I, you know, quote her in the article, but it’s a pretty obvious principle. If religious workers are suspected of being federal agents, then that makes it very difficult for them to fulfill their duties. If it’s part of the Mormon practice to proselytize and a community is suspecting Mormons of being federal agents, then they’ll be hostile to them. And that will, you know, constrict their ability to practice their religion. So that is one operation that ICE has been reported as doing.

The federal government’s response to this was really shocking to me. I sent them a question, and I said, “Is it consistent with ICE policy for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers?” And I would have expected a flat-out “no.” But instead, they explained exactly why and how it was consistent for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And just to be clear, this would be a situation where supposed Mormon missionaries are knocking on doors trying to find out who lives in a particular house or not?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Right. Well, it’s actually more targeted than that, typically. The ICE agents will suspect that a particular individual who has an outstanding warrant lives in a certain address and want to ascertain the time that that person will be there for purposes of effecting an arrest. And so, you know, they’ll go to any means necessary to try to obtain that information, including impersonating Mormon missionaries.

AMY GOODMAN: Has policy under Obama improved over policy over President Bush?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: I wish I could say yes. I think that there are a lot of people who are hopeful, and, you know, there’s some lip service to making certain changes on the ground. I haven’t seen any positive changes, you know, overall, that would suggest that there’s—

AMY GOODMAN: Has it become worse?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: I think in some respects. You know, the increase in these kinds of operations would suggest that that’s worse, because as different people have observed, that drives this activity underground. It makes it less available publicly for people to scrutinize what they’re doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Raul Grijalva, as co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, your response to this stunning exposé in The Nation magazine?

I thought he was—

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: —response is gratitude for exposing it. We have been—in my role and my membership with the Hispanic Caucus, been meeting with Homeland Security specifically about detention problems: lack of medical services, lack of access to any legal representation, family contact, the conditions in general, the huge growth in it. And now you add this layer of the 186 sub-field stations that are really under no public knowledge or notification. There’s—whatever minimal rule of law is applicable, it’s not applicable there. Yeah, this is something that not only the Hispanic Caucus, but certainly the Progressive Caucus, are going to need to aggressively follow up on and demand some real transparency and some real information about that.

It’s disturbing for many reasons. But, you know, here—a good example, the impersonating religious workers. Right now in Arizona, we have religious workers that are being prosecuted for aiding and abetting “illegals,” as they say, for putting water out in the desert so they won’t die. They are being prosecuted by the federal government for aiding and abetting. And at the same time, the irony is that now we have ICE agents impersonating religious workers in order to be able to apprehend people. That’s the kind of not only inconsistency, but hypocrisy, that worries us.

When we filed our bill for immigration reform in the House this—on the 16th of December, one of the areas was the whole area of detention that we added to this bill, about the fact that it had to be—there had to be judicial discretion, there had to be transparency, and there had to be a human contact in following the rules of law and the rules of detention of this country. And obviously these 196 don’t fall under even that minimal standard. And we need to do—we need to be aggressive about finding out what is really going on with this.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Congressman Grijalva, what about this issue of how things have changed in terms of immigration enforcement under the Obama administration, the less of an emphasis on these massive workplace raids, but increases— attempts at other means of increasing deportations?

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: No, I—you know, it’s like a—they’re movable parts, in the sense that until, you know, this Congress and this administration get very serious about reforming immigration, dealing with the human aspect of immigration, making that process just, making the legal process under the rule of law, we can say, on one hand, that we are deemphasizing the raids and, on the other hand, find other mechanisms and other methods and other strategies to basically accomplish the same end. And so, until we deal with the fundamental root cause of all this, you know, agencies, whether it’s Homeland Security or this administration or Congress, can continue to shuffle the cards, but, you know, the game has not changed entirely.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this issue. Congressman Raul Grijalva, thanks for being with us, Democrat from Arizona, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And Jacqueline Stevens, professor at UC Santa Barbara and the author of an investigation on secret ICE facilities published in The Nation magazine. We’ll link to that report. Her new book is called States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

http://i3.democracynow.org/2009/12/24/the_nation__immigration_agents_holding