New York Times
By Jennifer Medina
August 31, 2015
More
than 240 immigrants with criminal records who are living in the United
States illegally were taken into custody last week during a four-day
sweep across Southern
California, immigration authorities said Monday.
All
244 people taken into custody had been convicted of a crime and more
than half of them had at least one felony conviction, according to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officials, who called it the most successful sweep of its kind in the
region. The majority of those arrested had been convicted of violent
felonies, weapons or sex abuse charges. The rest had been convicted of
“significant or multiple misdemeanors,” immigration
officials said.
Roughly
two-thirds of the immigrants taken in the sweep were from Mexico, and
the remainder came from 21 other countries, including France, Ghana and
Thailand.
For
years, immigration officials relied on local prisons to help them
deport immigrants who had been convicted of crimes, asking them to hold
the offenders beyond their
sentences so federal agents could pick them up. But immigration
advocates said those requests, known as detainers, created a dragnet
that deported thousands of people unfairly. Last year, a federal judge
in Oregon ruled the practice unconstitutional, and California
enacted a law protecting all but the most serious criminals offenders.
“By
doing these operations periodically, we show everyone what we can do to
make the community safer,” said David Marin, the deputy field officer
for the immigration agency’s
Enforcement and Removal Operations in Southern California. “Because
local law enforcement haven’t been able to cooperate with us like they
used to, they have been releasing criminal aliens into the community,
and we have to spend a lot of resources to be able
to find them.”
This
summer, two cases in California renewed the debate over deportations of
unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes. In July, a young woman was
killed on a pier in
San Francisco by a man who had been deported to Mexico multiple times.
And in August, an illegal immigrant in Santa Maria was charged with
murder after he raped and beat a woman in her home.
Officials
say they are increasingly relying on the National Fugitive Operations
program, which was created to find immigrants who had failed to comply
with a deportation
order, to track down immigrants who have recently been let out of jail.
Mr. Marin said that the previous policy, which had allowed officials to
take people into custody directly from jails, was safer and less
costly.
After
the sweep, immigration officials hailed the arrests of three people who
had been convicted of sexual abuse. The operation, they said, focused
on convicted criminals,
gang members and people convicted of multiple or serious misdemeanors,
like drunken driving.
“What
we’re doing is targeted enforcement — these are all people who are not
only here illegally, but are convicted criminals,” Mr. Marin said.
“These are people who are
preying on our communities. We’re not just rounding up the lady selling
tamales on the corner or the guy standing in front of a Home Depot.”
Those who were arrested in the sweep but have not been deported previously will face an administrative hearing with a judge.
The others are likely to be deported more quickly.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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