http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/a_day_in_the_life_of_central_americans_crossing_mexico.html
February 12, 2016
A day in the life of Central Americans crossing Mexico
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
Over the years, I have spoken with Central Americans who've made the dangerous journey from, say, Guatemala to Texas. Yes, it is extremely dangerous. Young women have told me that they fear rape more than anything else. They run into wild animals, deadly snakes, and mosquitoes. There are no real friends once you start this trip to the U.S.
It starts by walking through jungles or deserts to avoid the Mexican authorities, as Azam Ahmed reported in the New York Times:
The police truck appeared suddenly, a glint of metal and glass. The migrants broke into a sprint, tripping over cracked pavement as an older woman sweeping her stoop urged them to hurry.
The 10 men rounded the corner and hid behind a row of low-slung trees. Four days into their journey from Central America, the new reality on Mexico’s southern border was setting in: Under pressure from the United States, the Mexican authorities were cracking down.
It raises the question: are things really that bad in Central America that people would run this risk to get to the U.S.? It's a complicated situation, as we would expect.
It's true that cartel and gang violence is tearing up small countries in Central America. Cartels have weapons and money, whereas many of these countries just can't keep up.
I think that they come for two reasons:
First, many families need to send their young men to the U.S. to send back money. El Salvador receives about $4 billion in remittances or "remesas." It's probably the strongest safety net in the country. My guess is that other countries have similar numbers.
Second, the Obama administration refuses to speak clearly and defend U.S. sovereignty. Also, we indirectly invite people to come north when we offer legalization to anyone who crosses over.
The attitude in Central America is simple: get to the U.S., and you are likely to stay.
On one hand, we appreciate a young man who wants to cut our grass and support his mom back home. At the same time, we shouldn't encourage people to come with vague enforcement language.
It breaks your heart, but we are a nation of laws. Finally, I'm proof that you can come legally to the U.S.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/a_day_in_the_life_of_central_americans_crossing_mexico.html#ixzz4003melWQ
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THE ENTIRE REASON BEHIND AMNESTY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED, BUILD THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY BASE, AND DESTROY THE GOP SO THE BANKSTER-FUNDED DEMS ESTABLISH A ONE PARTY GOVERNMENT FOR THE 1%,
"She said she still gets angry with employers and their lobbyist enablers who are “all about lining their pockets, making money off this free and cheap labor." Rodney Johnson’s widow, Houston police officer Joslyn Johnson.
After Deportation, Killer Returned Easily to U.S.
http://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/11/quintero-case-was-poster-child-porous-border/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20The%20Texas%20Tribune%20Sections&mc_cid=4aa569677d&mc_eid=3ccf90ee68
by Jay Root
Feb. 11, 2016
EnlargePhoto by Justin Dehn
Juan Leonardo Quintero, an undocumented immigrant pictured here in 2015 in a visitation booth at the maximum-security Allred Unit near Wichita Falls, is serving a life sentence for the 2006 murder of Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson.
The Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.
IOWA PARK — Before Kate Steinle was murdered in San Francisco by a homeless immigrant with five deportations and multiple drug convictions on his record.
Before Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to punish Texas sheriffs who don't toe the line on enforcing federal immigration laws.
Before Donald Trump began bragging about plans to build a border wall to keep out foreign lawbreakers.
Before all that, there was the case of Juan Leonardo Quintero.
For several years, Quintero was a poster child for the perils of loose border enforcement that allowed deported immigrants with criminal records to return to the United States — and the state and local policies that helped them escape detection once they got back.
In 2006, Quintero shot and killed Houston police officer Rodney Johnson after a routine traffic stop. The case generated headlines and calls for reform throughout Quintero’s trial and capital murder conviction in 2008.
Interest flared up again in 2009 after the arrest and guilty plea of the landscaper who hired Quintero. And, perhaps most famously, the case sparked a raging controversy in the 2010 race for Texas governor, when the undocumented immigrant was portrayed as a Willie Horton figure — a dangerous criminal whose misdeeds might have been prevented if only some politician had done things differently.
History faded from the front pages, and today Quintero is quietly serving out a life sentence in a maximum-security prison near Wichita Falls. In a recent jailhouse interview with The Texas Tribune, Quintero said he's still surprised at how easily he could return to the United States and resume work after being deported for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl.
“When they deported me, they just forgot about everything — that I had a driver’s license or whatever I had,” he said in fluent but heavily accented English. “They should be more ... I don’t know a word for that — pay more attention to everything they were supposed to have.”
Johnson’s widow, Houston police officer Joslyn Johnson, told the Tribune she feels genuinely sorry for undocumented immigrants who just want to work and get ahead but remains angry that federal, state and local agencies still have no way of keeping out — or keeping up with — men like the one who killed her husband.
“I do believe that most immigrants are law-abiding, hardworking people,” she said. “Unfortunately, the few criminal ones that we don’t know about — that’s the whole problem ... we don’t know if they’re criminals because we don’t know who’s here."
On to Houston
Unlike many undocumented immigrants who cross the southern border, Quintero, 42, has no searing memories of deprivation or tales of difficult passage north in search of a better life.
Life wasn’t all that bad in Celaya, Guanajuato state, in central Mexico, he said. His parents had a two-story house and he briefly attended college before dropping out to try his luck and enjoy some of that “freedom” in the United States he heard about.
Once here, keeping authorities guessing about his true identity became a way of life, Quintero said.
“When we don’t have no papers, we can give you different names,” he said from behind the thick glass of a visiting booth at the Allred Unit. “I never got no cars in my name, no credit cards. Nothing in my name. I didn’t even get it in my driver’s license.”
Read More"Criminal Aliens" Flashpoint of Border Security Debate
The first time he crossed, in 1994, he paid a coyote about $350 — a tenth or less of the estimated price these days — to ferry him to McAllen, Texas, crossing at Matamoros, and then, at the coyote's suggestion, it was on to Houston, he says.
“What I was thinking is, I get there, stay a year, couple years. Keep going north. I was planning all the way to Canada, Alaska, stuff like that. But I didn’t make it,” Quintero said. “I got stuck in Houston.”
It didn’t take him long to get in trouble. By his count he was “picked up about nine, 10 times” during his first five years in Houston, but there are only four criminal charges on his official record during the period. He was arrested for drunk driving and for failing to stop and give information after an accident in 1995, then driving with a suspended license a year later.
In 1998 he faced far more serious charges — indecency with a 12-year-old girl. Years after the incident she said Quintero, who admitted drinking 18 beers that day, grabbed her breast three times, the Houston Chronicle reported in 2006. In the Tribune interview, Quintero denied touching the girl inappropriately and faulted his attorney for talking him into pleading guilty in exchange for deferred adjudication.
He said his lawyers told him he would get probation but failed to mention federal immigration officials might be notified of his plea and, if so, would likely deport him. Sure enough, in April 1999, immigration agents surprised Quintero at his probation meeting and took him into custody. He was deported to Mexico in May.
Enlargephoto by: Justin Dehn
"I knew I was in trouble," Juan Leonardo Quintero says of the traffic stop during which he killed a Houston police officer. "I was worried about being put in prison."
Quintero tried to make a go of it back home. His wife, Theresa, and her two kids followed him there. But money was running out after a few months, and Quintero said he couldn’t give them the life they had come to expect in the states. So even though authorities told him “it’s going to be 10 to 20 years” in federal prison if he got caught coming back, he again set his sights north.
As it turned out, Quintero was sorely missed back in Houston, where he worked for Camp Landscaping in suburban Deer Park. The owner, Robert Camp, had already posted the $10,000 bond to free his worker from jail when he was charged with indecency with a child, federal records indicate. After he was deported, Quintero said, Camp lent him the money he needed to pay another coyote to smuggle him back into the United States. He crossed the border near Tucson, Arizona, and in late 1999 flew back to Texas and returned to his old job, he said.
Quintero said he was surprised the state didn’t take his driver’s license away when he was deported in 1999. His wife kept it for him, and when he returned to the United States it was still valid. DPS has since tightened up its requirements: To get a driver’s license today, applicants must prove lawful presence in the country.
"I knew I was in trouble."
On. Sept. 21, 2006, Quintero was speeding near Hobby Airport in his employer’s truck when he saw the familiar lights of a police car in his rear-view mirror. In keeping with his strategy of continual anonymity, he said he was not carrying his driver’s license. In a plaintive tone, he said he expected Rodney Johnson to cite him and let him go.
“It wasn’t like it was a stolen vehicle,” he said. “It’s just two tickets he was supposed to write right there.”
That’s not what happened. Johnson arrested Quintero so he could make a proper fingerprint identification. He patted Quintero down for weapons, but not thoroughly enough, missing a gun tucked inside his pants. Johnson was in the front seat filling out a booking sheet when Quintero, handcuffed, managed to pull the 9 mm semi-automatic pistol and shoot Johnson seven times — four in the back of the head.
Johnson was able to press an emergency button calling for back up before losing consciousness. When help arrived, officers found Johnson, a father of five, slumped in the front seat of his car with his leg hanging out the door and one foot touching the ground. He was pronounced dead at Ben Taub Hospital.
Quintero said in the Tribune interview that he didn’t want to re-hash details of his crime. He quickly confessed to the murder at the time and cooperated with authorities, though he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers contended that a childhood head injury made him act unreasonably in threatening situations.
But in the interview Quintero acknowledged a key point prosecutors argued during the trial — and one that his defense attorneys disputed: Looming over Quintero as he sat handcuffed in that squad car was the near certainty that he would go to prison for a long time if Johnson found out who he was.
“I knew I was in trouble. Since I came back, I knew I was in trouble,” he said. “I was worried about being put in prison.”
Quintero was convicted of capital murder, but in a decision that stunned both the defendant and the family of the police officer he murdered, the jury gave him life without parole instead of the death penalty prosecutors sought.
“I was expecting that I [would] get executed right there and then,” Quintero said. “It didn’t happen.”
Tightening the net
By the time the verdict was announced, Johnson’s murder had already sparked an outcry in Houston and beyond, immediately cranking up pressure on the city to change its immigration policy — namely, a 1992 order instructing that “officers shall not make inquiries as to the citizenship status of any person,” and forbidding police to contact immigration authorities unless suspects were arrested for serious misdemeanors or felonies.
On the day of Johnson’s funeral, officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement met with city leaders, including then-Police Chief Harold Hurtt, to discuss cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, recalls Houston’s top ICE commander, former Special Agent in Charge Robert Rutt.
“I said, ‘Chief, you don’t allow us in your jails. You don’t notify us when you’re releasing illegal aliens that we have detainers on. And he goes, ‘What?’” Rutt said. “To Chief Hurtt’s credit, he said, ‘You know what, we’re making a policy change right now.’”
The announcement came two weeks after Johnson’s death, when police said they would start closely cooperating with federal authorities and would check the wanted status — including for immigration violations — of everyone arrested and incarcerated. That’s still the policy.
“As of right now, ICE is allowed back in the city jail,” said Rutt, now retired. “So it took the tragedy of Rodney Johnson being killed.”
Craig Ferrell, HPD’s former chief counsel, said Houston Police had never outright banned immigration authorities from its jails but was wary of turning over inmates based on civil violations, as many immigration infractions are. After Johnson’s murder, ICE and HPD struck a formal agreement to cooperate on immigration matters.
“The agreement was they could come in immediately as long as they told us we’re going to approach this from a criminal perspective,” Ferrell said.
“You know people are coming here to make a living for their families, so if you take away the magnet, which is illegal employment, the people won’t come.”— Robert Rutt, Houston’s top ICE commander
The murder also brought big changes at Camp Landscaping. The federal government, in an unusually aggressive prosecution against an employer, arrested owner Robert Camp on charges of “harboring an illegal alien.” Investigators said that Camp knowingly hired Quintero despite his lack of work authorization and that he had put the immigrant’s wife on his payroll to fraudulently disguise the illegal employment.
Camp later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in prison, three months home confinement and five years’ probation, records show. A phone number found online for Camp Landscaping is disconnected, and efforts to reach Camp through his former lawyers were not successful.
Rutt said the case demonstrated that hiring undocumented immigrants “is not a victimless crime.” He said people who live and work here illegally fear being apprehended by law enforcement — as Quintero did — and sometimes take desperate actions to avoid it.
“All of a sudden they get pulled over for something basically innocuous, they see their life falling apart and they do some really violent things sometimes to avoid capture,” he said. “Unfortunately, the police or private citizens bear the brunt of it.”
Rutt also said the Camp prosecution put the focus on a soft target elected leaders and policy makers keep ignoring: the workplace. Take away the illegal jobs, and most of the problems at the border, where elected officials keep pouring resources, will disappear, he said.
“You know people are coming here to make a living for their families, so if you take away the magnet, which is illegal employment, the people won’t come,” he said. “Nobody will hire them.”
Even in prison, Quintero proved difficult to contain. A year and half after he killed Johnson, Quintero and four other inmates tried to break out of the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. Quintero got as far as the fence and cut himself on the razor wire before he was stopped. Guards shot three of the inmates, but they survived. After that incident, Quintero was sent to the maximum security Allred Unit near the Oklahoma border, where prisoners deemed to be high risk inhabit 75-square-foot cells and typically spend their days in solitary confinement.
After the escape attempt, Joslyn Johnson said it was too bad one of the guards hadn’t hit Quintero. She said she still considers the life sentence Quintero received for killing her husband, who had wanted to be a cop since he was a teenager, “a slap in the face.”
“We have to pay for this man to live in jail for the rest of his life,” she said. “I felt he deserved to die just like Rodney died.”
Enlargephoto by: Justin Dehn
Rodney Johnson’s widow, Houston police officer Joslyn Johnson.
Johnson herself had a memorable cameo in the 2010 governor’s race, when she was featured in a negative TV ad aired by Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign.
In the 30-second spot, Johnson looked straight into the camera and blamed Perry’s Democratic opponent, former Houston Mayor Bill White, for embracing “sanctuary city” policies that made it harder for local police to find and apprehend undocumented immigrants such as Quintero, who may present a danger to public safety.
White denied the accusation, though major changes in immigrant apprehension policies were made soon thereafter. The state made changes, too, after the mayor fired back that the Texas Department of Public Safety had dropped the ball by removing Quintero — and 2,000 others like him — from the public list of registered sex offenders after he was deported, though he remained on a criminal history database available to law enforcement. That meant he didn’t appear on the public list after sneaking back into the country several months later.
The sex offender registry snafu was fixed after White’s office pointed it out to the state agency following Johnson’s murder.
Before the Perry ad sank him even further in the Republican tide of 2010, the former Houston mayor bitterly accused his rival’s campaign of exploiting a grieving widow for rank political purposes.
Looking back, Johnson admits that “possibly I could have been” exploited but said she wanted to do it at the time and “doesn’t have any regrets.” She said she still gets angry with employers and their lobbyist enablers who are “all about lining their pockets, making money off this free and cheap labor.”
What hasn’t changed one bit, she said, is that local, state and federal authorities still don’t have a remotely good handle on which undocumented immigrants might pose a threat because the good ones and the bad ones are all living in the shadows, mixed together in a vast black market economy.
She noted that since her husband’s death, three more Houston police officers have been killed or seriously injured by undocumented immigrants with criminal records and previous removals from the United States. The officers were Kevin Will (killed in 2011); Henry Canales (killed in 2009); and officer Rick Salter (seriously injured in 2009).
Read MoreHouston Slayings Fueled Border Security Debate
“What’s offensive to me is the fact that [Quintero] could come into the country anytime he felt like,” Johnson said. “We don’t have enough people to keep track of everybody that comes in this country illegally ... We don’t even know the numbers.”
A missed chance?
A troubling footnote closes the story of Officer Rodney Johnson's death.
In his interview with the Tribune, Quintero claimed that less than a year before the murder, he was pulled over by Houston police for driving with a noisy muffler. Lacking a license or proof of insurance, he says he was taken to jail and fingerprinted, giving a fake name.
Quintero said the charges were dropped and he was released approximately two days later, no mention made of his sex offender status or previous deportation.
"They let me go," he said. "That was their mistake."
When the Tribune attempted to verify Quintero's story, Houston authorities could neither confirm nor refute it.
Houston police spokesman John Cannon said there was no evidence of such an arrest in Quintero’s homicide file, but in those days people detained for low-level “Class C” misdemeanors — representing about half of all arrests in that time period — had their names checked but did not have their fingerprints checked for warrants or wanted status by running them through state and federal databases.
If Quintero is telling the truth (the video of that part of his interview is available here) he slipped through the cracks of the legal system without leaving a trace, and an opportunity to remove him from the streets — and possibly the country — before he killed Johnson was missed.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Lawmakers investigating whether border crisis kids committed murder: Local press reports suggest the two teenagers are tied to MS-13, an international gang.
AMNESTY: IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED WITH ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR BORDERS, JOBS AND WELARE.
“There is kind of an odd bedfellows alliance on immigration that really drives much of immigration politics, which is that you have businesses that want cheap labor, and you have groups on the left ... that want more warm bodies to speak for and represent,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They really do have a confluence of interest.”
Donald Trump: More Criminal Illegal Aliens at Large in U.S. than Population of any City in New Hampshire
by Julia Hahn8 Feb 2016Washington D.C.110
At Monday’s rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump addressed the impact illegal immigration has had on criminality throughout American communities and warned that there are more criminal aliens at-large in the U.S. than the population of any city in New Hampshire.
Trump told his Manchester audience:
Right now, as we speak … we have 179,000 illegal criminal immigrants — illegal criminal — these are people that have been convicted of crimes, some very big crimes. That means that we have 179,000 people here that have committed crimes that shouldn’t be crimes — that shouldn’t be in the country … 179,000 people is bigger than any city, by a lot, in New Hampshire. That’s a massive amount of people.
Indeed, a report issued last week from the Senate Immigration Subcommittee found that “fugitive criminal aliens outnumber populations of all New Hampshire cities.”
For instance, the report notes that New Hampshire’s largest city, Manchester — where Trump’s rally was held tonight — has a population of around 110,000: “The number of at-large criminal aliens ordered removed dwarfs the population [of Manchester] by nearly 70,000.”
The report states:
There are at least 179,027 aliens in the United States who not only have been ordered to leave the country for violating our immigration laws, but who have also been convicted of a criminal offense, and have not left as required or been removed by ICE … While the ICE data includes only criminal aliens who have already been ordered removed, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, estimates there are more than 2 million total criminal aliens in the United States.
Trump continued, explaining to his New Hampshire audience:
We either have a country, folks, or we don’t. Remember this: we either have a country or we don’t. So we’re going to have to take people, we’re going to get rid of those 179 [thousand]. And I don’t want to put them in our jails… Our jails are costing us a fortune… We’re bringing them back where they came from, and let that country put them in prison for the next 25 years, because we’re not doing it. And they’re never, ever coming back to our country again. They are gone. Never.”
In contrast to Trump’s pledge to deport those residing in the country illegally,
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
79%
co-authored and championed an immigration bill, which, according to immigration law enforcement, would “provide instant legalization and a path to citizenship to gang members and other dangerous criminal aliens.” At the time, ICE Union president Chris Crane said that Rubio “directly misled law enforcement.” As Stephen Miller — Trump’s Senior Policy Adviser and former communications director for
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
80%
— recently told Breitbart News Daily, Rubio watched on as Chuck Schumer allowed Capitol Hill security to remove Crane from the Gang of Eight press conference. Miller said that Crane was removed simply “for having the temerity to ask a question” on behalf of law enforcement after Rubio had broken his promises. Breitbart News has previously reported how Rubio continues to support all of the substantive policies outlined in his Gang of Eight bill — including the controversial aspect of the bill which would have allowed convicted criminal aliens, such as sex offenders and gang members, to remain in the United States and become U.S. citizens.
Read More Stories About:
2016 Presidential Race, Immigration, Marco Rubio, Law Enforcement, ICE, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Gang of Eight bill, Stephen Miller, Chris Crane
"Criminal Aliens" Flashpoint of Border Security Debate
by Jay Root
Feb. 8, 2016
EnlargePhoto by Martin do Nascimento
A group of undocumented Mexican national ex-offenders enter Mexico at the US-Mexico border crossing at Brownsville/Matamoros after being deported from the United States on Nov. 4, 2015.
The Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.
Juan Francisco de Luna Vasquez passed through the Webb County jail at least four times on more than a half dozen charges before allegedly beating his wife to death with a hammer last year in Laredo.
Victor Reyes had already spent three months in the Hidalgo County Jail, four months in state custody and six years in federal prison for multiple felony offenses by the time he went on a random shooting spree in Houston, killing two people and injuring three more in January 2015.
And before Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly shot Kate Steinle to death on Pier 14 in San Francisco last summer, authorities say he had racked up a criminal record including seven felonies, mostly drug related, and a 1997 arrest for assault.
There are peculiarities to each case, but they have something in common: all three men were thrown out of the country multiple times by federal immigration authorities but returned illegally — through the Texas-Mexico border — before committing new crimes in the United States, records obtained by The Texas Tribune show.
Their crimes put them at the center of a red-hot political debate about illegal immigration, the revolving door at the southern border and controversial immigrant catch-and-release policies that pit deportation-fixated conservatives against liberal immigrant advocates.
How to deal with, or talk about, foreigners who commit crimes in the United States — the government’s term for them is the politically incorrect “criminal aliens” — has laid bare a bitter divide in the electorate and has prompted heated calls for vastly different solutions.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that undocumented immigrants make up a smaller share of those imprisoned in Texas — including on Death Row — than of the general population. However, a veil of government secrecy and inconsistent record-keeping make it difficult to accurately determine how many criminal immigrants are in the country or how many crimes they have committed. Fear, outrage and political jockeying have largely filled the information void.
“This is an issue that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work on it because we're so busy pointing fingers at each other.”— Sarah Saldaña, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Billionaire Donald Trump kicked off his smash-talking presidential campaign last year with criminal immigrants in his crosshairs, saying Mexico was sending its “rapists” and drug dealers to the United States and promising to build a gigantic border wall to keep them out.
Closer to home, liberal activists in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas are pressuring local law enforcement officials to build a different kind of wall — procedural barricades to block local officials from cooperating and coordinating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove people.
Their concern: In the rush to deport unwanted criminals from the ranks of the undocumented, a lot of otherwise hard-working and law-abiding foreign nationals are caught up in the dragnet — people like Raul Zamora, a University of Texas student who found himself facing removal after getting pulled over for a broken tail-light. Or Max Villaroto, a popular Iowa pastor deported last summer for minor crimes (DWI and using fraudulent documents) committed in the late 1990s. Civil liberties organizations also argue that federal authorities are violating the constitutional rights of some inmates, and in some cases those groups have successfully sued jails that hand inmates over to federal authorities.
No one is more aware of the schizophrenic impulses in immigration policy than Sarah Saldaña, the Texas-born director of ICE, which has a $6 billion budget and 20,000 employees spread across all 50 states and several dozen foreign countries. Many Democrats think she’s “heartless” when it comes to deporting and detaining immigrants, as one Democratic Congressional aide put it. Republicans think she’s not tough enough.
“What we're doing now is not satisfying to anybody — the left or the right,” Saldaña told The Texas Tribune in December. “This is an issue that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work on it because we're so busy pointing fingers at each other."
Slipping through the cracks
The political focus on criminal immigrants flows directly from official U.S. policy: Terrorists and public safety threats are the top priorities of the nation’s border security and immigration enforcement apparatus. President Obama famously said in 2014 that he wants to deport “felons, not families.” ICE insists it focuses on removing the “worst of the worst.” Even immigration hard-liners who say they want to deport everyone here illegally agree the bad guys should go first.
The problem is that criminals take advantage of the same porous border as otherwise law-abiding job seekers. And if they are apprehended in this country, sometimes they are set free by ICE or an immigration judge. Other times, they slip through the cracks of systematic communication breakdowns among local, state and federal law enforcement. Some of them end up committing more crimes.
In the late 1990s, infamous “railway killer” Rafael Resendez-Ramirez took advantage of the leaky border and law enforcement failures to repeatedly elude authorities, often using fake names, even though he was wanted by the FBI, was a suspect in several murders and had criminal records in at least seven states.
A damning federal report in 2000 highlighted poor training and interbureaucratic fumbling behind the decision giving Resendez a “voluntary return” to his native Mexico, for the eighth time, in the summer of 1999. He came back to the United States almost immediately and killed four more people over two weeks.
photo by: Justin Dehn
Juan Leonardo Quintero, an undocumented immigrant pictured here in 2015 in a visitation booth at the maximum-security Allred Unit near Wichita Falls, is serving a life sentence for the 2006 murder of Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson.
Fallout from the case helped prompt reforms and better sharing of criminal databases among law enforcement agencies, but weaknesses endured. That became clear a few months after Resendez was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, in 2006, when Juan Leonardo Quintero, a deported sex offender with multiple previous criminal convictions, shot and killed Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson in the back of his patrol car.
His case, like Resendez’s, sparked a series of reforms. The Texas Department of Public Safety had removed Quintero and more than 2,000 other sex offenders from its public registry, though not from the criminal database law enforcement uses internally, after they were deported — despite the possibility of their return to Texas. That practice stopped after Johnson’s murder.
After the high-profile murder, the city of Houston also changed its policy to allow more police cooperation with ICE to ensure that wanted criminal immigrants are handed over to federal authorities, recalls Robert Rutt, the agency’s special agent in charge at the time of the incident.
“It took the tragedy of Rodney Johnson being killed,” Rutt said.
Sanctuary cities
In spite of piecemeal reforms over the years at the federal and local level, significant lapses remain — and seemingly avoidable tragedies pile up.
Kate Steinle was shot dead in San Francisco just weeks after her alleged murderer was released from jail by local authorities who rebuffed a request from federal immigration authorities to notify them before his release.
San Francisco is among so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit or, in some cases, forbid local police and jailers from cooperating with ICE to catch and detain immigrants sought by the agency.
In the Steinle case, the agency wanted to take custody of undocumented immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez after authorities in San Francisco apprehended and processed him on an outstanding warrant. But under its policy of noncooperation with federal authorities on immigration matters, the jail released him without notifying ICE. Officials in California said if the agency wanted Lopez-Sanchez, it could have used its power to seek a court order to hold him.
Several years earlier in Chicago, similar “sanctuary” policies allowed Kenyan-born gang leader Mwenda Murithi to stay off ICE’s radar despite 26 arrests and four felony convictions. After he got out of jail in 2007, Murithi ordered a gang hit that led to the death of a 13-year-old girl who was caught in the crossfire. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison.
This deliberate disconnect between local authorities and ICE — a chief reason certain local jurisdictions get the “sanctuary city” label — ranks as one of the major ways immigrants slip through the hands of law enforcement, according to agency data obtained by The Texas Tribune under the Freedom of Information Act.
The federal records show local law enforcement agencies around the country declined to honor more than 18,000 “detainer” requests from ICE — a process used when the agency seeks custody of non-citizens in local or state jails — from Jan. 1, 2014 to September of last year. Two-thirds of them had criminal records, the records show.
Read MoreJails Refused to Hold Thousands of Immigrants for Feds
Generally speaking, when local officials don't honor a detainer, a foreign national wanted by federal authorities is released from a jail after an arrest or conviction. Some later get picked up by ICE for possible deportation. Some don’t.
Almost 60 percent of the refused detainers nationwide were logged in California. According to an internal ICE memo, obtained last year by the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, which vigorously opposes illegal immigration, 27 percent of the declined detainers in the first eight months of 2014 were associated with individuals who, soon after getting out of jail, allegedly went on to commit new crimes.
Most of the details of those alleged crimes were deemed confidential, and that part of the memo was blacked out. Not redacted: six incidents of recidivism that the agency considered “particularly high profile” over the eight-month period — five in California and one in Florida.
Among the foreign nationals in California who were let go and quickly got in trouble again: a sex offender in San Mateo County with a prior DUI who allegedly went on to sexually assault a victim under the age of 10; a Santa Clara County resident with “nine previous convictions (including seven felonies);” and a robbery suspect who got out of jail and was soon arrested on a rape charge.
Then there was this description in the ICE report: “On April 6, 2014, Los Angeles, California law enforcement arrested an individual for felony continuous sexual abuse of a child. Despite the severity of that charge, local law enforcement did not honor an immigration detainer ICE issued for the individual. After local law enforcement declined the detainer, the individual was arrested for felony sodomy of a victim under 10 years old.”
Texas accounts for a miniscule fraction of the declined detainers — less than one percent— making it the most ICE-friendly large state in the country. But Dallas and Travis Counties have “come onto the radar” of ICE officials due to the pressure that activists are exerting on officials there, agency Director Saldaña recently told the Tribune.
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Dallas — which has been sued at least twice over its cooperation with federal authorities — is the only county in Texas listed by ICE as having a policy that limits cooperation with the agency, though the sheriff’s office there says it has yet to decline a detainer request. One reason Dallas County has been taken to court is the allegation that it honored a federal detainer that ICE placed, in violation of the Constitution, on a U.S. citizen.
Travis County, a rare Democratic stronghold in an otherwise red state, logged half of the rejected detainers in Texas, with 72, between Jan. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2015, according to the data obtained by the Tribune.
The way some outspoken activists and elected officials see it, that number should be far higher. All four of the candidates in the March 1 Democratic primary to replace outgoing Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton — a Democrat who works closely with ICE despite immense pressure to stop — want to end cooperation with the agency when it issues detainers for non-citizen inmates. The Travis County Democratic Party and Austin City Council have also gone on record in the last couple of years calling for a break-up in the local-federal marriage.
“There’s a very good chance that our next sheriff may very well disentangle our relationship between local law enforcement and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” said Austin City Councilman Gregorio Casar. “I don’t think we should be complying (with ICE detainers).”
Casar rejects the notion that telling ICE to take a hike amounts to being “soft on the law.” Instead, he said families will feel safe — and more inclined to cooperate with the police — if they know they don’t risk deportation when they get in trouble locally.
Representing a heavily immigrant district — he’s the son of Mexican immigrants himself — Casar said conservative politicians use anecdotal evidence of crimes committed by immigrants to tar an entire population, “using xenophobia or fear or stereotyping of others as a way to move somebody’s political agenda forward.”
His argument points to another major flashpoint in the debate about immigrants who commit crimes — namely, how to measure the problem. Liberals and conservatives generally point to statistics that bolster their particular ideological views, yet virtually every data set contains flaws and caveats.
Hiding the numbers
Woefully incomplete record-keeping and intentional secrecy top the list of reasons why it's difficult to measure crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. During booking, local jails — in Texas and beyond — often don’t ask who’s a citizen and who isn’t. They’re supposed to determine whether an inmate is “foreign born,” but since that designation can include people here legally — everyone from agricultural guest workers to naturalized U.S. citizens — the data generally can’t be used to track crimes by those here illegally.
On the federal side, the institutional secrecy inside ICE makes it difficult to obtain or analyze how the government is handling undocumented criminal offenders — or, for that matter, whether non-criminal immigrants are being treated fairly in detention. Although the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was written only to protect citizens and lawful U.S. residents, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE by extension have adopted rules applying it to undocumented immigrants, including those with criminal records. In practice, ICE provides detailed immigration histories of “criminal aliens” only when it chooses to — as it often does after high-profile cases that spark local outrage.
For example, the agency quickly provided the extensive immigration history of Steinle’s alleged murderer after the fact, as it did in 2011 when Kevin Will became the fourth Houston police officer since 2005 to be killed or seriously injured by an undocumented immigrant previously removed from the United States. But ICE cites Privacy Act protections when citizens or the news media asks for lists of, say, multiple deportees with criminal records who have been released into a particular community — information that might point to a fixable glitch or policy shortcoming.
A federal judge on the East Coast triggered a rare burst of transparency from the secretive agency when she ruled in 2013 that ICE had to provide the names of thousands of violent offenders to the Boston Globe after a two-year legal battle. But today the agency considers that a one-off decision that applied only to the Globe’s request and has thus far refused to give the Tribune or other news outlets identifying information about any significant slice of the immigrant population it detains, deports or releases — including those with violent histories.
ICE even turned down the Tribune’s request for the immigration histories of nine of the state’s 12 undocumented death row inmates. The agency voluntarily provided the information on three of them, but