Agents apprehend 19 convicted felons over Labor Day weekend







  • MGN ONLINE


McALLEN — From drug traffickers to rapists and child molesters, U.S. Border Patrol agents had a busy Labor Day weekend apprehending people crossing illegally into the Rio Grande Valley.

Out of some 36 people believed to be in the country illegally that were taken before a federal judge Tuesday morning, more than half of them had been convicted of felonies in the United States involving rape, kidnapping or other drug-related crimes, court records show.

All of them were picked up by Border Patrol between Aug. 31 and Sept. 4, most after crossing the river near Hidalgo, Roma and Rio Grande City.

“There are those that are coming in search of a better life, but not everybody is coming for that purpose.

Some people are pretty bad people,” said Chris Cabrera, Border Patrol union vice president.

“When we come upon a really bad guy, like one of these people mentioned, oftentimes they’ll assault one of our agents to get away because they do have something to lose. They’ll lose their freedom if they get caught,” he added.

In fiscal year 2015, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported 235,413 removals, of which 59 percent or 139,368 were convicted of a crime, according to agency statistics.

Jose Alexander Lopez, 36, of El Salvador, was convicted of second-degree rape and was sentenced to 20 years in a federal prison in December 2004. He served less than six years, was deported on February 2010 and was instructed not to return to the U.S. without permission from the U.S. Attorney General or the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Lopez was apprehended Friday near Hidalgo, along with another man from Honduras who was convicted on three counts of aggravated assault and deported in 2013. No assaults were reported against agents who apprehended any of these illegal crossers.

“If we don’t put severe consequences on them, they are going to continue to re-offend in our country,” Cabrera said. “The reason they crossed over again is simple — it’s because they could. They know that we are not secure.”

The 19 convicted felons caught at the border over the weekend are only a fraction of the more than 500 people apprehended on a daily average across the Rio Grande Valley sector this fiscal year (October 2015 to July).

More than 147,000 people have been apprehended by Border Patrol across the Rio Grande Valley sector, nearly 45 percent of the more than 332,000 total apprehensions across the entire southwest border in the last 10 months, CBP data shows.

The rest of the river crossers facing a federal judge Tuesday morning were being prosecuted for having at least one previous illegal entry conviction on their record.

Alejandro Cortes-Guzman, 34, of Mexico, had been deported on Sept. 4, 2015, and was apprehended on Aug. 30 near Roma, court records show.

Another man, Jesus Martinez-Lopez, 54, was apprehended on Saturday at the Roma Port of Entry after trying to walk across the bridge from Mexico through the commercial bus lane. Martinez-Lopez, a Mexican citizen, had been deported in 2009 and in 2012.

“What I worry about are the people that we don’t catch,” Cabrera said. “We have a pretty big got-away ratio — I would say somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of those that cross get away.”

Cabrera said he also worries about the number of people that are not being deported and are being allowed to continue their journey into the United States after being apprehended by Border Patrol and turned over to ICE.

“The people that we catch, the vast majority are turning themselves in. They are walking up the road, and they are finding us,” Cabrera said. “Nine or eight times out of 10, we are giving them a notice to appear … and releasing them into the country with the promise that they’ll come back and see a judge.”

The backlog of cases in immigration courts across the United States is at an all-time high, according to the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse (TRAC), a Syracuse University-based project that tracks data from ICE and other federal agencies.

There are more than 500,000 pending immigration court cases across the United States, with California leading with about 93,000 and Texas with more than 88,000, TRAC data shows.

The non-partisan group has been tracking data since 1998 when there were about 129,000 backlogged immigration cases. Most of the people being released today by ICE in Texas with a court date will have to wait nearly two years before their cases are heard by a judge, according to TRAC data.

“I think with immigration reform, nobody knows when or how it’s going to happen, but it’s inevitable,” Cabrera said.

“The thing is we need to check everybody, because if you are coming over here for a better life, great. Do what you gotta do, but … we need to know what their intentions are, what their past is in our country and what the past is in their country, because we have enough homegrown bad people in our country. We don’t need to import anymore.”

http://www.themonitor.com/news/local...7da8d93bb.html