The federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrested 244 immigrants with criminal convictions over a four-day immigration raid in Los Angeles last week, according to a news release. The controversial practice is picking up steam months after the federal government dismantled a federal initiative, known as Secure Communities, that allows local jail officials to turn over suspected criminal immigrants to federal immigration authorities.
Unlike past ICE raids, which have targeted low-level offenders, the majority of detainees — 56 percent — in this raid had criminal records that contained serious or violent felonies. The rest of the arrestees had past convictions for significant or multiple misdemeanors, including DUIs. In comparison, a nationwide raid conducted in March which took in about 2,000 criminal immigrants, appeared to primarily go after hundreds of low-level offenders with DUI convictions, several of whom had turned their lives around and now have longstanding ties to the country.
The Obama administration has been under pressure to take a more heavy-handed approach to deport immigrants with criminal records after the death of Kate Steinle, a U.S. citizen who was fatally shot by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco who had been deported five times. The case has been sensationalized by right-wing commentators and presidential candidates like Donald Trump to broadly condemn immigrants as murderous criminals. Her death has also ignited controversy around cities that provide sanctuary for immigrants by declining to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
The raid was carried out by the National Fugitive Operations program, a task force formed to locate immigrants who “failed to comply with a judge’s deportation order,” the Los Angeles Times pointed out, but the program is now being used to “find immigrants with criminal convictions who have recently been let out of jail.”
In the most recent raid conducted last week, ICE identified several immigrants who fall under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) top immigration enforcement priorities, including people who are Priority 1 threats to national security, criminal street gang members, convicted felons and aggravated felons; and Priority 2 threats who are have been convicted of three or more misdemeanors or convictions for significant misdemeanors, like DUIs. One detainee, Vincente Onofre-Ramirez, was convicted in 2002 in New York for sexual abuse with force. He was previously removed from the U.S. after serving his sentence. ICE agents took him in last week without incident. Other detainees include a Guatemalan national and Salvadoran national who were previously convicted for sexually abusing children. Not all the detainees were undocumented, as the law also allows the deportation of legal residents who have been convicted and served time for crimes.
In a recent operation documented in a separate Los Angeles Times piece, author Kate Linthicum noted that ICE agents with guns and black Kevlar vests took in Hugo Medina, a 32-year-old immigrant who had a DUI conviction from 2010, petty theft conviction in 2014, and a drug possession from earlier this year, at his house. Medina was released from a jail in June after jail officials didn’t comply with a request to detain him. His mother, wife, and three children cried after he was taken away.
As part of a broad executive overhaul in November, President Obama axed a years-old, federal initiative known as the Secure Communities program, wherein local prison authorities shared biometric information, like fingerprints, of detained immigrants with federal immigration authorities. In turn, federal authorities could ask local jails to hold immigrants for potential deportation proceedings.
But the program resulted in more immigrants being turned over to immigration authorities for minor traffic and immigration violations, such as having a broken tail light, and also encouraged local police to racially profile drivers they thought might be immigrants. DHS’ Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) replaced the Secure Communities program in November, which allows ICE to go after criminal immigrants with raids instead.
Still, as immigration raids are growing increasingly frequent, it’s possible that federal authorities are also going after immigrants who served prison sentences for crimes committed years ago and have since turned their lives around. Christian Hervis-Vazquez, a father of three small U.S. citizen children, was deported to Mexico last Thursday after ICE officials took him in last month for a DUI conviction from 2010. When ICE conducted a raid in March, the agency also took in 912 immigrants with DUI convictions. One of the more high-profile cases from that raid includes Max Villatoro, a pastor at a Mennonite Church in Iowa, who was convicted of drunken driving in 1998 and pleaded guilty in 1999 to record tampering for buying a Social Security number, which was then used to get a driver’s license.
“My life is there,” Villatoro said on a press conference call ahead of Father’s Day, He had called Iowa his home for 20 years. “I’m a stranger here [in Honduras].”