enforcement

Saturday, January 26th, 1-4pm - DRUG WARS: Silver or Lead, a documentary

Alert date: 
January 11, 2013
Alert body: 

This is an event you will not want to miss:  DRUG WARS: Silver or Lead is a chilling documentary about the malignant spread of drug cartel presence in our country, our state and right here in our community.  OFIR is honored to welcome Rusty Fleming, award winning producer of DRUG WARS: Silver or Lead. 

Join OFIR, Saturday, January 26th from 1 - 4 pm at the Salem Public Library - Loucks Auditorium.

Learn what you should know, must know, but DON'T know about drug cartels.

Embedded in a vicious and violent drug cartel, Rusty filmed this documentary to teach us what we all need to understand about Mexican drug cartels and their malignant movement into our country and right here in our community. Meet the man that has been in the belly of the beast.Embedded in a vicious and violent drug cartel, Rusty filmed this documentary to teach us what we all need to understand about Mexican drug cartels and their malignant movement into our country and right here in our community. Meet the man that has been in the belly of the beast!

The High Intensity Drug Traffic Area (HIDTA) identifies eight counties in Oregon with critical drug problems.   

The I-5 corridor is a favored route among drug runners smuggling drugs from Mexico into Oregon, Washington and Canada. We are in harms way everyday and must become educated about what is really happening on our streets, in our schools and even at our kids parties.

If you have teens, friends with teens, grandchildren that are teens or neighbors with teens, please invite them to join you at this FREE event.                  

Apathy and ignorance of this issue is not an excuse, it's a major part of the problem.

If you have questions about this event, would like more information, or think that you could contribute to this program in a positive way, please contact us at 503.435.0141.

NOTE:  This award winning documentary is not a Hollywood movie, it's an actual, factual, behind the scenes look at how cartels operate and the dangers they pose for our children and our society.  Portions of this film are sickening and horrific, but true.  Please, be advised and prepare your children in advance.

NOTE:  The producer of the documentary recommends that children as young as 10 should see this movie.  Gangs and cartels are targeting even younger children now.  Shockingly, eight year olds are the new cartel target for drug addiction.  Every child is at risk.

No prison in distracted driving crash

A couple who pleaded guilty to various charges in connection with a distracted driving crash that killed a motorcyclist were sentenced to three years’ probation on Friday in Benton County Circuit Court, but they remained in custody awaiting possible deportation.

Veronica Avila Diaz, 28, and her husband, Jose Antonio Cejas Gutierrez, 31, have been in jail since Oct. 11 on charges stemming from a Sept. 30 collision that took the life of a 72-year-old Eugene man, Kenneth Douglas Carroll.

The wreck occurred on Highway 99W north of Monroe. Avila Diaz, who had little driving experience and no license, was behind the wheel of the couple’s Ford Windstar van, with her husband in the passenger’s seat and their three children riding with them.

According to the account presented in court, she was distracted by Cejas Gutierrez, who was photographing his wife with his camera phone as she drove south toward Monroe.

She started to drift off the road and then overcorrected, veering into oncoming traffic. The van struck Carroll’s motorcycle, killing him. A third vehicle, with three people inside, swerved off the road to avoid the wreck.

“Jose was taking video of her driving, asking her to look at him,” prosecutor Shani Krumholz said in court on Friday. “The last shot that was taken prior to her hitting the shoulder is a shot of her looking directly at the camera.”

In a plea bargain negotiated with the Benton County District Attorney’s Office, Avila Diaz pleaded guilty on Friday to a single felony count of criminally negligent homicide. Six misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment, related to the other people involved in the crash, were dismissed along with a charge of reckless driving.

Cejas Gutierrez pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution, also a felony, and four misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment.

Emotions ran high in the packed courtroom during the sentencing portion of the hearing, when the victim’s relatives and the defendants had a chance to speak.

“Even though my dad was 72 years old, he had at least 20 years left in his life, which was taken prematurely by some people’s really stupid decisions,” said Kelly Carroll, the dead man’s daughter. Pausing frequently as she fought back tears, Carroll described her father as a loving parent, devoted grandparent and dedicated community volunteer.

Her brother, Brad, described his dad as “a really incredible man” and said his death had “left a void in my life.”

Both asked Judge Locke Williams to impose prison time.

The defendants, dressed in striped jail jumpsuits and shackled hand and foot, asked for forgiveness.

Speaking through a Spanish interpreter, Avila Diaz turned to face Carroll’s relatives in the gallery.

“I want to tell the family who’s here that I’m very sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I would not have ever intentionally taken anybody’s life or hurt anybody. I’m really, really sorry.”

Williams called the crash a tragedy caused by “a horrendously stupid act that, unfortunately, in this day and age with cellphones, people do each and every day.”

However, citing the defendants’ lack of criminal history, he declined to send them to prison. Instead, he ordered the couple to serve three years’ probation on the felony counts and imposed sentences of 30 to 60 days on the lesser charges, which were satisfied by the time served since their arrest.

He ordered Avila Diaz to pay $18,198.78 in restitution, fines and fees and ruled she could not hold a driver’s license for one year. Cejas Gutierrez was required to pay $18,598.78 and had his license suspended for 90 days.

“It’s always a difficult balance of just punishment, retribution and what’s appropriate in each individual case,” he said. “There is no good solution in this case.”

Avila Diaz was represented by Nicolas Ortiz. Cejas Gutierrez was represented by Karen Zorn.

The couple, who came to the United States from Mexico about nine years ago, were being held by order of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending further proceedings on their immigration status.

Kelly Carroll, the victim’s daughter, said she was bitterly disappointed that the defendants will not see prison time. Deporting them to their home country, she said, would be like punishing two naughty children by sending them to their room.

“This is just a travesty of justice,” she said after the hearing. “There is no justice here.”
  Read more about No prison in distracted driving crash

Changes loom for illegal migrants

Alamo, Texas -- President Barack Obama‘s health care overhaul threatens to roll back some services for the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can’t afford to care for as many poor families.

The law envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

This hurts the people who have found care through the country’s expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government.

For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital or community health clinics.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation’s second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities “where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point,” Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. “In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds.”

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried. California, home to the nation’s largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state’s public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

 

A slightly longer and different version of this article is available. Read more about Changes loom for illegal migrants

Investors Business Daily publishes OFIR VP article

Once again, OFIR's Vice President Rick LaMountain has written an exceptional article.  An overview of the GOP's folly of a plan to woo the Hispanic vote, 'Illegal-Alien Amnesty Gives Democrats 7 Million New Voters'  dissects and breaks down the plan with indisputable facts. Read more about Investors Business Daily publishes OFIR VP article

Senate Intern Arrested as Undocumented Immigrant, Registered Sex Offender

An unpaid intern to Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., was a registered sex offender and undocumented immigrant and is now facing deportation, a DHS official confirmed Wednesday to ABC News.

The intern, 18 year-old Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta from Peru, who worked in a New Jersey office for Menendez, was arrested on December 6th. News of the arrest was first reported by the Associated Press.

The senator’s office was informed Monday of the arrest and the senator was informed today, Menendez said. The Senator defended his office’s action today, emphasizing that the intern applied, was recommended and vetted by his school for the internship, not the Senators office.

“We asked status of all of those college interns, nothing didn’t indicate anything about his status and we certainly wouldn’t have known through any background checks since he is a minor about any sex offender status,” Menendez said on MSNBC this afternoon.

Once Menendez’s office was informed of the arrest, the Senator’s New Jersey staff director let the intern go from the program.

“He’s an unpaid college intern so it’s not like he’s a staff paid person,” Menendez said, “There is no way we could know about his status. We ask about status…there is no way we could know about any allegation as a juvenile about what his background would be in terms of any criminality.”

Menendez is a advocate for immigration reform and noted today that this does underscore the urgency of such reform.

“I can’t know who is here to pursue the America dream versus who is here to do it damage if I can’t get people to come forth out of the shadows, go through a criminal background check and determine who is here to pursue the dream and make sure those who are here and who have criminal backgrounds ultimately get deported,” he told MSNBC today.
  Read more about Senate Intern Arrested as Undocumented Immigrant, Registered Sex Offender

Police stop pickup, find meth and heroin

ROSEBURG — Two men were arrested Saturday afternoon after a state police trooper found large amounts of methamphetamine and heroin hidden in their pickup.

The drugs were discovered after a trooper stopped a northbound 1998 GMC Sierra for an unspecified traffic violation on Interstate 5 about eight miles south of Roseburg.

After identifying the truck’s occupants, troopers conducted an investigation that led them to find about 3½ pounds of methamphetamine and 1 pound of heroin concealed in the vehicle, police said.

The drugs’ estimated street value is $66,000, police said.

The truck’s driver is identified as Feliciano Ayala-Cardenas, 31, of San Jose, Calif. The passenger is identified as Sergio Gustazo Pineda-Villanueva, 23, of Aloha.

Both men were lodged in the Douglas County Jail on charges of unlawful possession and delivery of heroin and methamphetamine. Both men also face federal immigration charges, police said.

On Sunday night, state troopers seized 16 pounds of marijuana from a vehicle that had been stopped for a traffic violation while traveling north along I-5 just a few miles from where Saturday’s traffic stop occurred. Three Washington residents were cited and released on drug charges in the marijuana case, police said.

http://www.registerguard.com/web/updates/29161839-55/police-charges-heroin-traffic-methamphetamine.html.csp

OSP Traffic Stop Leads to Arrest of Two Men, Seizure of Over 3 lbs of Meth, 1 lb of Heroin - Interstate 5 south of Roseburg (Photos)
Oregon State Police - 12/10/12

Two men were arrested Saturday afternoon during an Oregon State Police (OSP) traffic stop on Interstate 5 about eight miles south of Roseburg after the trooper discovered over 3 pounds of methamphetamine and a pound of heroin concealed in their vehicle.

On December 8, 2012 at approximately 2:30 p.m., an OSP trooper stopped a 1998 GMC Sierra two-door displaying Oregon license plates northbound on Interstate 5 near milepost 115 for a traffic violation. The vehicle was occupied by two men identified as driver FELICIANO AYALA-CARDENAS, age 31, from San Jose, California, and passenger SERGIO GUSTAZO PINEDA-VILLANUEVA, age 23, from Aloha, Oregon.

Subsequent investigation during the traffic stop led to the discovery and seizure of approximately 3 1/2 lbs. of methamphetamine and one lb. of heroin concealed in the vehicle. Estimated value of the seized drugs is $66,000.

Both men were taken into custody without incident and lodged in the Douglas County Jail for Unlawful Possession and Delivery of a Controlled Substance - Methamphetamine and Unlawful Possession and Delivery of a Controlled Substance - Heroin. Douglas County Jail records also reflect both men have ICE holds. Read more about Police stop pickup, find meth and heroin

Many freed criminals avoid deportation, strike again

FLUSHING, N.Y. — Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.

She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.

But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.

They quietly let him go.

Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.

Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.

“She lived in horror in the last two weeks of her life,” said Yongwei Guo, Wu’s widower, through an interpreter in New York. “She knew there was somebody coming to kill her and we asked the police for protection, and also the government, but they did nothing.”

Wu is just one casualty of an immigration system cloaked in a blanket of secrecy that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined, a blanket that isn’t lifted even when life is at risk. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have emerged as the largest law enforcement network in the United States since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and they are increasingly dealing with criminals, but they play by very different rules than the local police, prosecutors, or even the FBI.

A yearlong Globe investigation found the culture of secrecy can be deadly to Americans and foreigners alike: Immigration officials do not notify most crime victims when they release a criminal such as Chen, and they only notify local law enforcement on a case by case basis. And even though immigration officials have the power to try to hold dangerous people longer, that rarely occurs.

The Globe also found that the pattern of secrecy extends to the treatment of immigrants who end up behind bars, though they have no criminal records. Foreigners in immigration detention have fewer rights than ordinary criminal suspects and limited ability to get word to the outside world about their plight. Even their names are kept secret, purportedly for their own protection, and many never get a public hearing to make their case.

Taken together, the system produces a litany of consequences: A young Lynn woman with no criminal record died in immigration custody from a heart ailment without a chance to ask a judge for medical help; a father of five in Texas disappeared from his family for several days after he was detained; a Cuban man in a wheelchair languished for an extraordinary 14 years in immigration detention, invisible to the world outside.

It is also a system in which — as Wu would learn in her final days of terror — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, routinely releases dangerous detainees to the streets of America without warning the public. Over the past four years, immigration officials have largely without notice freed more than 8,500 detainees convicted of murder, rape, and other crimes, according to ICE’s own statistics, mainly because their home countries would not take them back.

Deporting illegal immigrants requires more than simply putting them on an airplane to their own country. People being deported need travel papers — such as a passport — like anyone else who travels abroad. If their native country refuses to issue the necessary papers , the United States cannot send deportees there. And the Supreme Court has said ICE cannot hold the immigrants forever; if immigration officials cannot deport them after six months, the court said, they should generally set the immigrants free.

When the Globe requested the names of the released criminals under the Freedom of Information Act, federal immigration officials refused, saying it would be a “clearly unwarranted invasion” of the immigrants’ privacy. Officials said public interest in their names was “minimal” anyway.

“In the absence of any identified public interest or explanation as to how the disclosure of the arrestees’ information will advance that interest, the personal privacy interests will prevail,” Matthew Chandler, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration, said in a written statement to the Globe.

But a disturbing number of foreigners have been arrested after their release, including some for heinous crimes. Abel Arango, an armed robber who was released when his native Cuba wouldn’t take him back, shot and killed a Fort Myers, Fla., police officer who responded to a report of a loud fight between Arango and his girlfriend in 2008. Binh Thai Luc, an armed robber from Vietnam, couldn’t be deported either, so he was released. In March, he allegedly massacred five people in a San Francisco home.

McCarthy Larngar, a Liberian national who served several years in prison for shooting and wounding a man in Rhode Island, was released in 2007 when Liberia would not take him back — even though a Boston immigration official had described him in court records as “a danger to the community.” After multiple brushes with the law, Larngar was arrested last year and charged with tying up and robbing a man and a woman in a bizarre kidnapping in Pawtucket. His lawyer said in court documents that he is not guilty, and he is now in a Rhode Island jail on a violation from an earlier crime.

In New England, immigration officials have released as many as 10 convicted murderers since 2008.

They include Hung Truong, a robber who repeatedly stabbed a bound and gagged 15-year-old Everett girl during a 1989 kidnapping that left the girl and her mother dead. Massachusetts released Truong on parole about 20 years into his life prison sentence in hopes that he would be deported to his native Vietnam in 2010. But ICE could not deport him because Vietnam has refused to accept deportees who came to the United States before 1995. Now, he’s back in prison after failing a drug test that was part of his release deal with the state Parole Board.

As part of its investigation, the Globe filed more than 20 different public records requests to obtain more detailed information about the people held — and released — by the immigration system. Many requests were rejected or the responses were heavily censored, prompting the Globe to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in November. But this much is clear from the available documents: Federal officials are releasing people that they regard as dangerous and doing little to force recalcitrant countries to take their citizens back.

More than 20 governments from Jamaica to China routinely block deportation of their citizens, even dodging calls from US immigration officers seeking to expedite the process, and critics say they suffer few consequences. Some, such as US Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, argue that the United States should stop accepting diplomats from countries who do not repatriate their citizens, but the State Department has shown little interest, preferring to work through diplomatic channels to deport immigrants. Federal officials have refused to issue visas to only one nation, tiny Guyana in South America.

Even when foreigners cannot be deported, immigration officials, under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, could seek to hold them longer on the grounds that they are a danger to the public. Immigration officials say the legal standard for holding an immigrant longer for that reason is very high, limiting their ability to use it. They point out that immigrants are detained for civil immigration violations and not crimes.

But the Globe found that immigration officials almost never try to declare a detainee dangerous: In the past four years, immigration officials have released thousands of criminals, but court officials say they have handled only 13 cases seeking to hold immigrants longer because they are dangerous.

Too dangerous to release

Immigration agent Earl DeLong and his colleagues wasted little time in trying to put Shafiqul Islam on a plane back to his native Bangladesh two years ago. As soon as he finished his prison term in New York for taking pictures of himself sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl when he was 17, immigration agents called the Bangladeshi consulate in Manhattan.

Initially, the Bangladeshis were reassuring and a consular official, Mamunur Rashid, said he sent the agent’s request for clearance to deport Islam to authorities in Dhaka. But as time dragged on, the cooperation waned.

Whenever DeLong and others called the consulate over the next few months, Rashid was increasingly unavailable. The receptionist said he was not in. He was on vacation or out to lunch. Sometimes, a person at the consulate answered the phone and just hung up. Other times, the phone rang but nobody answered.

“Spoke to a person at the consulate four different times, never able to speak with Mamunur Rashid,” one agent wrote in a secret federal log that became public as part of a lawsuit.

US officials had seen stalling tactics from Bangladesh before: The impoverished Asian nation typically took several months to provide passports for criminals being deported last year — if they provided the documents at all, according to federal statistics.

Foreign countries are understandably reluctant to accept criminals, especially those such as Islam who were raised in the United States, and they have little incentive to do so since the United States rarely takes action against them, such as refusing to issue them visas.

State Department officials acknowledge that they try to avoid reaching the point of sanctions with nations like Bangladesh, but insist that they do apply diplomatic pressure.

“It is a matter we take very seriously, and consistently raise it at high levels with all countries where this is a concern,” said department spokesman Ken Chavez.

Hoping Bangladesh would clear Islam’s return, US immigration officials told Islam in April 2011 that they were going to continue to hold him even though more than six months had passed since Islam’s sexual abuse sentence ended. Islam responded with a lawsuit, charging that immigration could not continue to detain him because it was unlikely that Bangladesh would take him back. In the lawsuit, he pointedly noted that the consulate appeared to be dodging the immigration agent’s calls.

Islam’s lawsuit made public a host of immigration documents that are normally kept secret. The documents revealed both immigration officials’ concerns that Islam is dangerous and their frustrating attempts to contact the Bangladeshis.

But there is no evidence in the file that immigration officials requested an immigration court hearing to determine if they could continue to hold him as a threat to public safety.

Instead, the records show that on Oct. 3, 2011, immigration officials gave up and released Islam.

Seven weeks later, Islam was at Lois Decker’s door.

Everyone loved the retired school lunch lady, a friendly 73-year-old grandmother who taught Sunday school and lived her whole life in Hillsdale, N.Y., a rural hamlet just across the border from the Massachusetts line. Decker raised five children, but she lived alone in the house her daughter bought for her on Cold Water Street.

Sheriff’s deputies say they are unsure what drew Islam to Decker’s house that day, but family members said she had planned to rent out an apartment in the basement. Islam had a construction job in the Berkshires.

Hours after Islam visited Decker’s house, police arrested him in a traffic stop in a nearby city. He had stolen Decker’s white Hyundai, crashed it, and then tried to steal the truck of good Samaritans who had stopped to help him. He finally stole yet another truck, but did not get far. When police arrested him, he was spattered with blood, and had Decker’s credit card in the truck.

Sheriff’s deputies discovered a gruesome scene at Lois Decker’s house. The woman had been strangled, court records showed, and her face and throat were slashed. Officials found Islam’s semen on a sheet in the house, though officials did not find bodily evidence that Decker was sexually assaulted.

Columbia County officials were incensed and demanded to know why ICE had let such a dangerous person go free. They had convicted the high school dropout on sex abuse charges in 2008. Now he’s serving 20 years to life for Decker’s murder.

Paul Czajka, the silver-haired district attorney and a former judge in Columbia County, said immigration officials should have argued that Islam was dangerous enough to hold longer.

“He was a child abuser and registered sex offender, therefore by definition he was a danger to the community,” said Czajka. “It would not have been a difficult hearing to make that case.”

But ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein said the agency had little choice but to release criminals such as Islam and Chen because the courts have made it difficult to hold even mentally ill immigrants longer without new criminal charges against them.

“For this reason, the agency’s ability to utilize the continued detention of removable aliens ... is extremely limited,” Feinstein said.

Lois Decker’s grieving relatives say they’ve been told very little about how Islam gained his release and was able to kill her. Until a Globe reporter contacted the family, they had no idea that Islam had filed a federal lawsuit to get out of jail.

“It’s crazy to me that we don’t know this information,” said Decker’s daughter Diane Demarest, a veterinarian who lives in Oregon.

Some US and Bangladeshi officials involved with Islam’s case did not even realize he had killed Decker until contacted by the Globe.

Gail Y. Mitchell, an assistant US attorney in New York who defended ICE against Islam’s lawsuit to get out of jail, said the case ended because immigration officials released him. She would not say why they didn’t pursue the case and did not know that Islam had gone on to murder Decker.

Bangladesh consul M. Shahedul Islam said he did not know that Islam had killed Decker either. “This guy?” the consul said, raising his eyebrows and pointing to four passport-sized photos of Islam in a file with letters from US immigration officials asking for help with deportation.

The Bangladeshi consulate said Bangladesh did not approve Islam for return because they could not verify he was a citizen of their country.

“We always cooperate with Homeland Security,” said the consul, who is not related to Shafiqul Islam, and he apologized if his staff hung up on ICE agents.

But, for Decker’s family, the conflicting explanations don’t help.

“How could someone not have stopped him along the way?” asked Demarest.

Light sentences for heavy crimes

The uncertainties of the deportation process have another little known effect: Some foreigners get reduced prison sentences when they are convicted of crimes because judges believe they are sure to be deported after their sentence is over. Federal immigration officials warn against the practice, saying that deportation is not a 100 percent certainty even for the worst offender.

No one knows that better than the man Antonino Rodrigues allegedly shot between the eyes this year.

Rodrigues, a convicted drug dealer in the country illegally from Cape Verde, was facing almost four years in federal prison in October 2010 for possessing a stolen, loaded weapon. New Bedford police had caught him: They knew Rodrigues had outstanding arrest warrants and they were pleased when a detective spotted him bar-hopping on the city’s south side.

When Rodrigues appeared for sentencing before US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock in Boston for the latest in a string of convictions, federal guidelines called for 37 to 46 months in prison.

But defense lawyer Syrie Fried argued that Rodrigues deserved a lighter punishment because he was going to deported anyway. She told the judge Rodrigues had “no prospect of release back into our society.”

Woodlock went along, giving Rodrigues just two years in prison with credit for time served, clearing the way for Rodrigues to finish his prison sentence in March 2011.

“Given the defendant’s near certainty of deportation, the sentence is sufficient but not greater than necessary,” the judge ruled.

But Cape Verde officials did not take Rodrigues back, so immigration officials released him late last year. The Cape Verde consulate in Boston did not respond to questions about why they did not accept Rodrigues.

On June 17, 2012, Rodrigues resurfaced outside an apartment on New Bedford’s Walnut Street, where police say he shot Monzes Goncalves in the forehead with a .22-caliber gun. Goncalves miraculously survived and identified Rodrigues as the shooter.

Rodrigues denied shooting Goncalves and turned himself in to police because he heard they were looking for him.

Fried, the lawyer who helped Rodrigues win a shorter prison sentence in 2010, said she was surprised to learn that her client was still in the United States. She said she did not stay in touch with him because, typically, foreigners who are convicted of serious crimes leave the country.

“I was under the impression ... that he was going to go straight from serving his jail sentence and be deported,” she said.

The fact is, Rodrigues’ case is not unusual. In Massachusetts over the past four years, the Parole Board has granted early release to 22 immigrants convicted of second-degree murder or manslaughter, several times stating that their willingness to free the prisoner was influenced by his expected departure from the United States. Some prisoners told the board they planned to leave voluntarily for a job in Sierra Leone or a place to live in Cambodia.

However, at least five of the 22 were still here as of July, and, it’s unclear what happened to the other 17. One of the five still here under state supervision is Hung Truong, the Vietnamese national who helped murder an Everett mother and her daughter. Truong had been disciplined more than 30 times in prison, but the board said his behavior had improved — and Truong was possibly leaving anyway.

“It is the judgment of the board that he should be paroled [to federal immigration officials] for possible deportation,” wrote the parole board in its unanimous vote on Sept. 24, 2010.

More than two years later, Truong is still here — in MCI-Shirley, a Massachusetts prison, after flunking a drug test he was required to take as a condition of his release.

No one has to tell Qian Wu’s widower about immigrants getting light sentences for heavy crimes. Yongwei Guo’s wife was killed by an illegal immigrant who prosecutors said was initially sentenced to only 30 days in prison for attacking her the first time. Immigration officials ultimately detained Huang Chen off and on for more than three years in hopes of deporting him, but it wasn’t enough.

“They are not taking responsibility,” Guo said. “They can’t let such a dangerous man free merely because China won’t take him.”

No warning for victims

Long after her assailant went off to prison, Qian Wu kept an eye out for him in her Flushing, N.Y., neighborhood, scanning the crush of pedestrians flowing into the markets, the take-out joints, and the massage parlors nearby. She quizzed the fruit vendors on the street. Nobody had seen Huang Chen. Nonetheless, Wu kept a restraining order out against him — just in case.

Wu had a tough exterior, but those close to her said her attitude masked her fear. She was thin and walked with a limp from injuries she suffered in a car accident years ago. She hardly spoke English, and she had fled political repression in China. And until she remarried in 2008, Wu was a woman on her own, running an employment service for immigrants.

“She was disabled, so she had to be tougher than the others,” said Guo.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country at a detention center in El Paso, federal officials were trying to figure out what to do with Chen, a man who could seem normal one moment and mentally unbalanced the next. Immigration officials continued to hold Chen for another year after his 30-day sentence ran out, holding out hope that China would take him back.

When that didn’t happen, an immigration agent dropped Chen off at a local homeless shelter, in April 2008.

But just two months later, El Paso police arrested Chen after he punched two men in a plaza downtown. Then, just days after Chen got out of jail for the assaults, police arrested him again on a disorderly conduct charge for attacking a man on a bicycle right in front of them. Police described him as “a danger” to himself and others in their report.

Chen returned to the El Paso detention center to await deportation, but again China refused to take him back, so in October 2009, immigration officials again released him. This time, he made it clear that he wanted to get back to New York. He blamed Qian Wu for his troubles, court records later showed, and he knew exactly where to find her: Apartment 3F in a building on 40th Road.

When Chen walked through Wu’s unlocked front door for the first time since 2006, she ran downstairs and begged neighbors to call 911. She asked police and prosecutors for help with a new restraining order, since hers had expired, but never managed to get one. Guo warned his wife to stay inside.

One desperate night, Guo recalled, he asked Wu what they should do, and she responded bitterly.

“She said we can just wait to die,” he said.

Most victims, including Wu, have no idea that the criminal who victimized them has been released, based on a Globe analysis of ICE’s little-known victim notification program and the number of immigrants released from its custody. Federal immigration statistics show ICE has released or deported more than 1 million criminals over the past decade, but they have made just 1,000 to 3,000 victim notifications.

Currently, only 336 crime victims are enrolled in ICE’s program, compared with 2.2 million victims in the Justice Department’s electronic notification system in 2010 alone.

Immigration officials say they want more crime victims to sign up for their system, but it’s up to the victims to register. Wu’s widower was unsure whether she had been offered the opportunity to enroll, though he knows she would have been interested.

The Queens district attorney’s office, which handled Chen’s attacks on Wu, said they were not aware of Chen’s release. ICE officials say they are under no obligation to contact law enforcement officials when civil immigration detainees are released, though they do so when officials request it.

In Flushing, court records show, Chen stalked the panicked Wu for days. He moved into the same building, a few doors down. He tried to reach through the metal gate on her door and unlock it. He even took the $200 her husband gave him to go away.

On Jan. 26, 2010, security camera footage showed Chen leaving Wu’s building, his green sweater soaked in blood. Police arrested him at a local hospital seeking treatment for a hand wound.

Chen, now 50, made no secret in court that he wanted to kill Wu as revenge for his long stint in prison. Justice Richard L. Buchter called the murder “cold-blooded and grotesque,” and especially senseless because Chen was not supposed to be here at all.

“I just — I am just disturbed by what you told me regarding the fact that this person should have been deported and was not,” said Buchter, who sentenced Chen to 27 to 29 years in prison.

Wu’s widower has filed claims against ICE and multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the New York City Police Department and Chen.

From his offices in Times Square, lawyer George W. Clarke said Guo’s case is one of the toughest he’s had in years, because immigration officials provide so little information. They ask him questions he said they should answer, such as when they released Chen, and refuse to provide documents.

“They’re not telling us anything,” Clarke said. Later, he added: “I think it’s just the immigration service doesn’t want to be bothered or exposed to liability for releasing people who may be guilty of crimes and who have no right to be here, such as Huang Chen.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to e-mails and phone calls about Chen’s case.

The whole experience has shaken the Rev. Bill Morton, an El Paso priest who gave Chen a cleaning job when he got out of detention and sometimes drove him to meetings with ICE. Over time, he became concerned about Chen’s mental health and, looking back, he wonders why immigration officials didn’t express similar concerns, or warn volunteers like him.

“I’m totally pro-immigrant, but I’m certainly not pro-ignorance or indifference where you’re exposing criminal people or insane people on an unknowing public,” Morton said. “That’s not helping immigrants or the US or the person themselves.” Read more about Many freed criminals avoid deportation, strike again

MSNBC profile ignores the influence of Barbara Jordan Commission on NumbersUSA's founding

MSNBC today is suggesting that NumbersUSA's grassroots citizen army very well may stand in the way of the mass media's rush to proclaim "comprehensive immigration reform" (mass amnesty) a done deal in the next Congress. Thanks for the respect.

But the MSNBC article nearly completely neglects to inform readers about why we stand against both a mass amnesty and the current mass legal immigration of a million a year. And it is the "why" that gives us the great influence that MSNBC says we have with Congress.

When the American people realize they have a choice between filling millions of jobs with citizens of other countries or in filling them by putting millions of their fellow Americans back to work, polling shows their enthusiasm is for their struggling fellow citizens -- especially Black and Hispanic Americans who are suffering incredibly high jobless rates. The source of NumbersUSA's influence is that we work around attempts of most of the nation's elites to keep discussions of loosened labor markets out of the public eye.

I spent about 90% of my long interview with the MSNBC reporter talking about how I created NumbersUSA in 1996 to carry out the recommendations of the bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform that was chaired by the late civil rights icon Barbara Jordan -- and about how that commission was responding to a two-century debate about how loose or tight immigration policy should make the U.S. labor market. Looser labor markets hold down wages, while tighter labor markets push wages up and press employers to greater degrees of efficiency to justify the higher wages.

The Barbara Jordan Commission (video) came down on the side of a tighter U.S. labor market. So does NumbersUSA.

In a nutshell, those entities clammoring for CIR (comprehensive immigration reform) -- whether or not their intention -- are fighting for loosening a labor market that already is awash in excess labor. Some 20 million Americans who want a full-time job can't find one. The CIR supporters are seeking a policy that will further devalue the labor of workers, depress wages and slow down the ability of any other economic efforts to lower the unemployment rates.

No wonder the elites who profit or gain power from high immigration want to nearly always racialize the issue and avoid the economic discussion -- and why they try to pretend that the Barbara Jordan Commission never existed.

The commission found that the renewal of mass immigration over the last 30 years has created great economic injustices against the most vulnerable members of our society. Fighting against those injustices has always been at the heart of NumbersUSA's activism, although neither that nor the commission itself was mentioned in the long MSNBC article.

As I note to nearly every reporter who calls -- and is left out of nearly every story that gets written -- NumbersUSA's goals were not plucked out of the air. They come from the recommendations of the federal commission. Those goals are to reduce annual permanent immigration in the short term from the approximately one million a year to around 500,000 by eliminating chain migration, the visa lottery and taking away the jobs magnet that feeds so many illegal immigrants eventually into the legal channels.

The MSNBC story refers to our "professions of moderation" that "are what’s most striking about Beck and Numbers USA" and says that pro-amnesty supporters say it is our moderation that makes us "so dangerous."

Our position and that of the Barbara Jordan Commission indeed are moderate and balance many interests. There are many reasons why more traditional numerical levels of immigration of around 250,000 a year would be better for the country, but the 500,000 as an immediate goal represents a great compromise with contending interests.

The hard-line ideologues are those who insist on continuing to give out another one million permanent work authorizations each year -- and ask for even more -- to compete directly with our own unemployed. NumbersUSA is always committed to reminding Americans that they have a choice for a different, more humane, immigration policy.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
 

California prosecutor wants his county to change policy on illegal immigrants

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Martin Moreno roughed up his ex-girlfriend like an “animal" until police arrested him at gunpoint, according to a witness. Juan Flores bashed a man in the head with a beer bottle, producing a wound that required 25 stitches. And Francisco Gomez twice punched a 2-year-old with his closed fist — hard enough to trigger a brain hemorrhage.

All three were in this country illegally and could have been deported under federal law if Santa Clara County had been willing to hold them for immigration agents. Instead, they were treated like U.S. citizens and released either on probation or on bail under a county policy that effectively bars all immigration “holds." Since then, they’ve thumbed their noses at the criminal justice system and gone on the lam.

Armed with disturbing examples like these, District Attorney Jeff Rosen is urging the county board of supervisors to rescind one of the nation’s most lenient immigration policies. Rosen contends the year-old county policy unnecessarily endangers the community by allowing illegal immigrants with a history of violent or serious crimes to be released rather than held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.

The county’s policy must change, Rosen argues, “to protect public safety, protect taxpayer’s dollars and protect victims’ rights."

Tinkering with immigration policy is a touchy matter in a county where one in four residents was born in a foreign country. Staunch advocates of the county policy, including ambitious local politicians and some defense attorneys, argue that engaging local authorities in immigration enforcement undermines immigrant communities’ trust in the police, making people afraid to report crimes as a witness or even a victim. They also point to abuses of authority by ICE and note that many defendants were brought to the U.S. when they were young children and have deep roots here.

But the prospects for at least tweaking the policy are greater now that its main proponent, Supervisor George Shirakawa, is under heavy fire for charging thousands of dollars of questionable expenses on his taxpayer- funded credit card.

The board of supervisors is expected to vote whether to change the policy early next year, after a group of law enforcement officials, including Rosen, Acting Public Defender Molly O’Neal and Sheriff Laurie Smith, recommends a course of action. Smith supports honoring ICE detention requests for illegal immigrants with a history of violent or serious crimes; O’Neal is open to discussing the issue but has concerns.

The issue exploded last year when Santa Clara County became only the second jurisdiction in the nation after Chicago’s Cook County to release illegal immigrants with a history of committing serious or violent crimes onto the streets. Read more about California prosecutor wants his county to change policy on illegal immigrants

Howard agrees to proposed $1.3M settlement

Those eligible for part of a proposed, $1.3 million class-action settlement alleging discriminatory hiring practices at Howard Industries’ Laurel transformer plant have until Nov. 29 to opt out of their piece of the settlement.

Howard entered into a settlement agreement without admitting any wrongdoing to avoid protracted litigation in a lawsuit filed by four plaintiffs alleging the business held discriminatory hiring practices toward non-Hispanics.

U.S. District Court Judge Keith Starrett entered an order Oct. 5 outlining the processes involved in distributing the settlement. The settlement will only be approved following a Jan. 23 final fairness hearing before Starrett.

Veronica Cook, Yolanda Phelps, Charlyn Dozier and Seleatha McGee, all African-American, said in their Feb. 2011 lawsuit they repeatedly applied for employment at Howard Industries, but were only hired after the company was raided by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On Aug. 25, 2008, 592 illegal workers were arrested at the electrical transformer plant in Laurel in the biggest workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.

The lawsuit was filed one day after Howard Industries Inc. pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a $2.5 million fine for violating immigration laws.

Howard Industries former human resources manager, Jose Humberto Gonzalez, pleaded guilty in December 2009 to conspiracy and admitted he hired hundreds of people whom he knew were in the country illegally.

Gonzalez was sentenced in 2011 to five months of house arrest, placed on five years probation and fined $4,000.

Howard will put the settlement funding into an account designated by a jointly selected claims administrator.

“The claims administrator will accept claims from purported members of the class and will determine whether those individuals are, in fact, class members and, if so, whether they are entitled to a payment under terms of the settlement agreement,” Starrett wrote in his order.

The administrator will divide class members into four categories to include:

• Plaintiffs named in the lawsuit

• Those who applied between Jan. 1, 2003 and Aug. 25, 2008 who were not hired or offered employment, and records show no valid, non-discriminatory reason for non hire, but were hired after Aug. 25, 2008

• Those who applied during the same period and were not hired while Howard’s records show no valid, non-discriminatory reason

• Those who applied during the same period and were not hired, but records do not affirmatively show the claimant was qualified.

Howard will also offer 70 of the class members a position within nine months of the settlement to be selected by lottery.

Following the entry of Starrett’s order, the administrator began mailing notice of the class action and proposed settlement to eligible class members.
  Read more about Howard agrees to proposed $1.3M settlement

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