Thread: Round 'Em Up, Head 'Em Out .... For all the good it will do ....

Immigration sweep yields 761 arrests
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Federal officials said Tuesday they arrested more than 750 illegal immigrants over the past week in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in what they described as one of the biggest such sweeps in U.S. history. The weeklong series of raids in the five-county region targeted illegal immigrants who had previously been deported for crimes or had ignored final deportation orders.

The raids netted 338 illegal immigrants who were arrested at their homes and apartments and 423 who were identified in area jails since Jan. 17. Those already jailed will be transferred to federal custody when they finish serving their state sentences, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The sweep netted illegal immigrants from 14 countries in all, including Mexico, Honduras, Ukraine, India, Japan, Poland and Trinidad.

Of the 761 people arrested, more than 450 have already been deported, Kice said.

The raids were a major push within Operation Return to Sender, a crackdown that has resulted in 13,000 arrests nationwide since June. Immigration officials have also identified 3,000 inmates in state and local jails who will be deported.

The operation targets those illegal immigrants who go into hiding after skipping their deportation proceedings and criminals who have re-entered the United States after being previously deported for crimes committed in this country.

Officials estimate 600,000 illegal immigrants who have ignored deportation orders are still at large, Kice said.

The Associated Press rode along for the first day of sweeps in Orange County last week. Immigration officers gathered at 4 a.m. in a chilly parking lot for a pep talk, then fanned out to houses in Anaheim and Santa Ana.

At the first stop, an apartment complex, a half-dozen agents arrested a 29-year-old illegal immigrant wanted for a driving-under-the-influence conviction. Kice said that man is now helping them find his brother, a registered sex offender.

At the second stop, the agents were looking for a convicted rapist and immigration fugitive. Instead, they arrested six men who could not provide legal papers — and later learned that all six were illegal and four had criminal records.

The rapist they sought had moved out the week before, Kice said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070123/...igration_raids



California Latinos fearful after immigration raids
By Tim Gaynor
2 hours, 14 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Cook Rosa Maria Salazar's eyes dart anxiously to the door as customers file into the Salvadoran cafe in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles. "We're terrified. The police could come for us at any time and deport us," she said in Spanish earlier this week as diners fingered maize tortillas stuffed with beans and pork scratchings and chatted softly.

The 55-year-old undocumented worker from Guatemala is among many Hispanics deeply shaken by recent immigration raids at the heart of Latino communities in southern California.

The-seven day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep, dubbed "Operation Return to Sender," targeted jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, where police took 423 of what they called "criminal aliens" into federal custody for deportation, after being held on charges unrelated to their immigration status.

Federal agents from seven teams also fanned out in local communities, where they nabbed 338 undocumented immigrants, more than 150 of whom were classed as "immigration fugitives" -- foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

The raid was the latest in a series of get-tough enforcement measures by ICE in the United States, but the largest action of its kind in California, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic. "We hadn't seen anything like this here before, and it came as a shock," said Antonio Bernabe, a community worker who runs a day labor program at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. "The police didn't just take people with deportation orders, they took anybody ... guys who were just hanging out in the street and even from a Jack in the Box restaurant ... and now people are afraid to go out," he added.

RAIDS AS BUSH BACKS OVERHAUL

The high-profile sweep netted mostly Mexican nationals, but included people from 14 countries including Ukraine, Japan, Poland and Trinidad. It culminated on Tuesday, when President George W. Bush gave a State of the Union address that ranked immigration legislation among his top domestic priorities.

Bush called for "comprehensive immigration reform," combining a guest-worker program with tougher workplace and border enforcement. He remained vague, however, on the thorny issue of how to deal with the 10 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the shadows, more than 2.5 million of whom live in California.

Some immigrants who followed the speech closely on Spanish-language television in Los Angeles remained hopeful of concessions in the aftermath of the sweep. "I came here to work and help support my family, so obviously the raids were alarming," Salvadoran construction worker Remberto Flores told Reuters in Spanish as he waited for a bus in a neighborhood of taco stands and wire transfer shops.

"But we saw President Bush talk about reforms in the Senate, so maybe there will be some breaks for us as well," he added.

Others in the city believed that the only clear message from the raids and the speech was that the situation for immigrants in California had changed. "We used to feel secure here," Nicaraguan electrician Manuel Salomon told Reuters as he sipped coffee in a Mexican bakery in the city. "But it looks like that honeymoon is over."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070125/...ation_raids_dc

U.S. immigration swoop targets criminal aliens
Tue Jan 23, 6:54 PM ET

PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. immigration police have rounded up hundreds of criminal aliens in southern California, as part of one of their largest ever roundups of foreign lawbreakers and immigration violators, police said on Tuesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the week-long sweep identified 423 criminal aliens due for release from jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, and took them into custody.

The operation also led to the arrest of 338 undocumented immigrants in the area, more than 150 of whom were classed as "immigration fugitives" -- foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

"It is one of the largest crackdowns on criminal aliens ever carried out in the United States," Kice told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"The goal of our enforcement efforts is two-fold. First, it's about restoring integrity to our nation's immigration system. Second, it's about safeguarding our communities from those who brazenly disregard our laws," she added.

Those arrested in the swoop have all either been removed from the United States already or face deportation.

The sweep came as part of "Operation Return to Sender," a nationwide initiative targeting criminal aliens, foreign nationals dodging deportation orders and other immigration violators.

ICE said most of those detained came from Mexico, although the sweep also netted nationals from 14 countries including Ukraine, India, Japan, Poland and Trinidad.

The operation is the latest in a series of raids in the interior of the United States, where immigration enforcement has been stepped up in recent months.

In December, ICE agents arrested more than 1,300 mostly Mexican workers in coordinated swoops on Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070123/...criminals_dc_1

More immigration officers watching jails
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer
Thu Feb 1, 5:27 PM ET

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Juan Martinez was looking forward to returning to his construction job after a one-month sentence for violating probation on drug charges. But when he got out of the Orange County jail, he was met by immigration agents bent on deporting the 23-year-old illegal immigrant with $68 in his pocket and few prospects.

"I just probably won't come back," he said about being sent to Tijuana, Mexico. "If I do, I'll keep coming back to prison and I don't want that."

U.S. jails and prisons have become strategic chokepoints in the search for illegal immigrants. More federal agents are more closely watching local jails for potentially tens of thousands of immigrants subject to deportation. Federal officials also are enlisting local authorities to do background checks on people under arrest.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say more jail checks are crucial to preventing serious crimes by illegal immigrants.

In December, for example, an illegal immigrant with a history of arrests for assaults and drug offenses shot two Long Beach police officers before he was killed in a gun battle. "This isn't really an immigration issue. It's a public safety issue," ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said. "You can be sure there'll be a finger-pointing drill at the end of the day if they do something evil."

About half of the nearly 190,000 illegal immigrants deported last year had criminal records, U.S. authorities said. Sweeps of jails over the past seven months by ICE agents have netted more than 5,500 people nationwide, and a new system designed to track federal inmates has flagged about 6,000 people at 119 prisons, the agency said.

Past efforts to identify illegal immigrants in jails were haphazard, with federal authorities checking inmate rosters at some lockups weekly at best. Some of the worst immigration violators were allowed back on the streets after doing their time.

Conservative groups are pleased with the new strategy but worry that the emphasis on jail checks is a political gimmick that could divert much-needed personnel and other resources from stopping illegal immigrants at the border. "This is a way to do it that everybody is for but has no real effect on the overall immigration flow," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank. "It shuts up the critics."

Immigrant rights groups say illegal immigrants might stop reporting child abuse or domestic violence to protect husbands or fathers from deportation. They also worry that people who have been stopped for minor offenses or wrongly arrested will be deported. "It's a practice that leads to weakening or eliminating civil liberties," said Nativo Lopez, president of the Los Angeles-based Mexican American Political Association.

Starting in 2008, ICE plans to assign 220 more employees to jails through its Criminal Alien Program. The agency would not say how many employees are now in the program. The agency received a $45 million funding increase this year to bolster criminal deportations, said Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security for ICE. It has requested an additional $31 million next year, which would bring the program's budget to $168 million.

The funding falls short of paying for putting immigration officers at all the nation's jails and prisons. But ICE hopes to extend its reach by expanding another program that allows authorities to train local jail officers to screen for illegal immigrants themselves. That program received a nearly $50 million budget increase — a tenfold jump — for 2007.

The training program is already in place in county jails in California and North Carolina and in the Arizona state prison system.

The four counties in Southern California that participate have identified more than 4,600 illegal immigrants since October, Kice said. In Mecklenberg County, N.C., nearly 1,300 have been flagged in one year, said Sgt. Quinn Stansell.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070201/...tkBHNlYwM3MTg-

Doesn't even make a dent in the 12 million or so still here

But it's a step in the right direction!

3/11/2007
Jails Still Checking Only a Fraction of Inmates for Immigration Status


Last year Michael Hiltzik and I had a little debate about the City of Costa Mesa’s plan to check the immigration status of arrestees in Costa Mesa jails. Hiltzik said it wouldn’t do anything; inmates in jail already have their immigration status checked. I said he was wrong, and argued that only a small percentage of arrestees are checked.

Who was right? Well, why do you think I’m bringing it up?

The L.A. Times reported yesterday:

A spot check by federal agents has identified 59 street gang members in Southern California jails who are illegal immigrants subject to deportation, sparking a debate about the role of border enforcement in the region’s battle against violent gangs.

And guess what? We’re still checking only a fraction of the arrestees in L.A. County — just as I said last year. The article states:

The Times reported last month that an increase in screeners allowed authorities to question nearly 10,000 of the 170,000 inmates who went through county jails last year about their immigration status.

10,000 of 170,000. That about 6%, if you’re keeping score. If we checked all of them, we’d get about 17 times as many.

The number red-flagged — those who face possible deportation once they serve their sentences — went from 3,050 in 2005 to 5,829 last year.

If checking 10,000 resulted in 5829 deportable immigrants, then if the numbers remained constant, checking them all would result in about 99,000 illegal criminals that we could deport.

But why would we want to do that? Let’s let them walk our streets instead. That’s a much better solution!

They’re really cracking down in Costa Mesa, the city whose policies sparked last year’s debate between me and Hiltzik. And is the crackdown working? Why, yes. Yes, it is: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...ck=1&cset=true

In his first month on the job, the federal agent stationed in the Costa Mesa jail recommended that 46 foreign-born inmates be deported, triggering praise from anti-illegal-immigration activists and concern from local Latinos.

Officials found the number surprising:

ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the number of those arrested who were sent to a federal judge for deportation proceedings was “higher than we anticipated. But the volume will probably fluctuate significantly” month to month.

And there are some serious criminals among those nabbed:

Of the 46 suspected illegal immigrants arrested in Costa Mesa last month, 23 are accused of felonies and 23 of misdemeanors, according to city statistics.

One man had an arrest record in five states and had been deported three previous times, Kice said.

Another had drug convictions and been deported five times before, she added.

Naturally, The Times has chosen instead to focus on those they consider less dangerous, such as this sob story about a hardworking guy arrested for driving his bicycle on the wrong side of the road. Note that, further down in the story, there is a passing mention that he is not necessarily representative of the bulk of criminals to be deported: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/c...ArticleID=0715

Although Tzir’s crime was minor, many of those swept up in Costa Mesa in December were arrested on serious charges. Of 20 arrest records the city was able to provide, most involved men in their mid-20s charged with crimes such as selling drugs and burglary. One involved a
19-year-old accused of having sex with a minor.

Why weren’t any of these folks the subject of a lengthy L.A. Times profile?

I think you know the answer to that.

The bottom line is this: as I have argued before, our top priority in fighting illegal immigration should be ridding the country of the criminals — especially the gang members and other violent criminals who prey on our citizenry.

Yesterday’s story reports that Special Order 40, which prohibits police from inquiring into suspects’ immigration status,

has been loosened slightly, allowing gang officers to ask about the immigration status of suspects only when they recognize them as having been previously deported.

That’s not good enough. Gang officers should be able to check the immigration status of any violent gang member. And we need to be checking every single person in our jails — not just 6% of them.

This isn’t hard, folks. Why aren’t we doing it??

UPDATE: My statistics above depend upon the numbers staying constant, as I say in the post. Commenter David Markland notes that the numbers might not remain constant because the population selected might not be random. It’s a good point, and I don’t know the answer.

http://patterico.com/2007/03/11/5932...ration-status/