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Justice Denied - Illegals In The USA
February 01, 2011 posted by Steve Brownstein
By Stephanie Czekalinski
Being in the United States without the government's permission, such as after a visa expires, is a violation of civil - not criminal - immigration law that can result in deportation.
But sneaking into the country is a crime - a misdemeanor. Sneaking back in after being deported is a felony.
When Anel Gonzalez was 13, her mother brought her to the United States from Mexico on a six-month tourist visa.
Instead of leaving when the visas expired, the family stayed, said Gonzalez's mother, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation.
In August, a police officer caught Gonzalez, now a 21-year-old mother, driving a speeding car. She did not have a license and was not wearing a seat belt.
She faced deportation as a result.
Rather than locking her up, ICE gave her a date to appear before an immigration judge and released her to care for her 8-month-old daughter, according to ICE.
But she spent four days in the county jail for the traffic violations waiting for a court-appointed interpreter and then for ICE to decide whether to take her into custody or release her with a court date.
Although federal agents say they target illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, many of those taken into custody are not criminals.
About half of the more than 390,000 people deported nationally in fiscal year 2010 had no criminal record, according to ICE.
Between 2002 and this past March in Franklin County (Ohio), more immigrants were arrested and turned over to ICE for driving without a license than for any other violation, according to one analysis of Franklin County jail booking data.
The second reason was drunken driving.
ICE said that partnerships with local authorities are essential to its mission: Deport all illegal immigrants, starting with those who are a threat to national security or public safety.
Critics say that ICE's quotas - 400,000 in 2010, according to an ICE memo - cause agents to focus resources on easy targets - illegal immigrants who have broken minor traffic laws but who quietly live in the country.
"They're supposed to be looking for rapists, murderers, criminals. But in reality, they go after low-hanging fruit," said David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration lawyer and president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Officials deny that goals influence how they choose whom to deport or how they operate.
"If they've been arrested by a local or state agency, we're still going to interview and take appropriate action," said Corey Price, assistant director of the local ICE field office. "Not because of a quota, (but) because that's what we're tasked with."
A witness cooperating in a murder trial was deported from central Ohio because ICE and local officials got their signals crossed.
On Christmas Eve 2009, police found the body of 22-year-old Miguel Martinez-Vargas riddled with bullets in a bar parking lot.
They also found a key witness: an illegal immigrant.
Prosecutors dropped the charges against a U.S. citizen charged with the killing after ICE deported Daniel Mercado back to Mexico.
Word that any contact with authorities - even as a witness or victim of crime - can land immigrants in deportation proceedings has spread through the Latino community.
"They're going to be very reluctant to step forward as a witness," said Ruben Herrera, an immigrant-rights activist. "They feel like they're putting themselves at risk."
Identifying 'Juan Doe'
Two people wanted by police were given a free pass after a man with the same name was arrested in early 2009 for driving without a license and later deported.
Authorities determined that 24-year-old Mauro Perez, of Nationwide Boulevard (Columbus, Ohio), also was Mauro Perez of Beacon Hill Road and Mauro Sanchez Perez of Caleb Drive - both of whom were wanted for failing to show up for court to resolve traffic cases.
There were no fingerprints to compare, no photos of the other two men, and none of the men's stated birth dates matched. But the court stopped looking for the other two men when Perez was deported.
"The problem is that it's difficult to ID illegal aliens," said Baker, the city's chief prosecutor.
Illegal immigrants can't legally get Ohio driver's licenses or ID cards. They don't have Social Security numbers that can be used to confirm identity. And few carry ID from their home countries.
Some give police fake names or birthdates to avoid trouble when stopped.
"There might be 23 active warrants, and we have no way of knowing it," Baker said.
Sometimes officials arrest the wrong person for a crime because of confusion about identities, said Beth Owens, identification supervisor with the Franklin County sheriff's office. "If they use each other's IDs and names, and they do, then you're dead in the water."
The lack of reliable ID makes it difficult for authorities to know whether they're dealing with a young mother living in the country illegally or an illegal immigrant who came to sell heroin.
From 2002 to March 2010, 43 people identified as Juan Doe or Jose Doe - the Spanish equivalent of John Doe - were booked into the Franklin County jail, according to a Dispatch review of jail booking data. None was turned over to ICE.
And confusion can still occur even when people give their real names.
Police, court clerks and jailers struggle with Latino names because they often have two first and two last names. Names are sometimes hyphenated, reversed, merged, Anglicized, misspelled or simply entered incorrectly into the court database.
That's a likely explanation of how three different men named Mauro Perez morphed into one.
Immigration authorities deported a man who identified himself as Raul Villa-Guerra after he was convicted of a heroin-related charge in 2000 in New Mexico.
Nine years later, Columbus police arrested 29-year-old Daniel Ortez Soto in Clintonville on a similar charge.
Both cases involved heroin and an illegal immigrant from Mexico of the same age.
But one link wasn't coincidence: Villa-Guerra and Ortez Soto have the same fingerprints.
Federal authorities determined they are the same man. And they charged Villa-Guerra with coming back into the country after deportation, which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison for people convicted of aggravated felonies.
He'll serve about 31/2 years for sneaking back in. Then he'll be deported again.
But he won't be tried for any charges related to heroin trafficking.
His municipal case was dismissed, including $87 in court costs. And he was never indicted in county court, according to records.
This year, federal immigration authorities launched a program in eight Ohio counties, including Franklin, in which will help federal agents identify more illegal immigrants when they land in county jails.
A standard fingerprint search will now check both an inmate's criminal history and immigration status and will notify ICE if the inmate is in the country illegally.
Nationally, the percentage of people with criminal records who are in ICE custody is growing.
In the first months of 2010, the percentage of people with criminal records detained by ICE was more than 40 percent, compared with roughly 25 percent in 2009, according to a report by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an organization that gathers and analyzes data from federal agencies.
The government is tight-lipped about what kind of criminal histories those immigrants have, said Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute.
"It could be anything from grand larceny to running a stoplight," he said.
Statewide (Ohio), it's difficult to know exactly whom ICE removes and for what. ICE provides very few details about its activity in Ohio, usually citing immigrant privacy.
In August, a rumor circulated in the Latino community that ICE agents entered a Columbus home without a warrant early one morning and took several people into custody.
ICE confirmed that agents made five immigration arrests and said residents let agents into the apartment. But they wouldn't explain whom they sought, whom they found or what threat, if any, the immigrants posed to the public.
Whether they were quietly living their lives like the young mother Anel Gonzalez or dealing drugs like Raul Villa-Guerra is unknown. ICE declined to explain.
