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Agents jail illegal immigrant who was headed back to his homeland
By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
January 25, 2006

Angel Palacios-Rivera was in the United States illegally, but he was about to board a plane to Mexico City on Nov. 30 when federal immigration agents arrested him.

Now, instead of being in his native Mexico, Palacios-Rivera, 37, is bound for a U.S. prison.

Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn told Palacios-Rivera that he faces up to 20 years behind bars. After he serves his term, he will be deported to Mexico.

Palacios-Rivera's lawyer questioned the wisdom of prosecuting her client since he was already headed to his native land.

"Of course it's not the best use of our resources," Janine Yunker said after Palacios-Rivera pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to unlawfully re-entering the United States after being deported for committing a crime.

The crime, according to court documents, was misdemeanor sexual assault on a 16-year-old girl in Montana in 2003.

Palacios-Rivera was deported about four months after he was convicted. He has admitted re-entering the United States illegally less than a year later.

He was on his way back to Mexico on Nov. 30 when he was arrested at Denver International Airport. He had a ticket and a boarding pass for a Mexicana Airlines flight.

Yunker said it was a one-way ticket.

She said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents may be stationed near airline gates to catch people who are in the United States illegally because "it's an easy place to look for people."

But ICE agents were at the airport as part of Homeland Security's US-VISIT program, said ICE spokesman Carl Rusnock of Dallas.

That program, run by a sister agency to ICE within Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, is aimed at tracking legal visitors to the U.S., recording when they enter the country and when they leave.

It includes fingerprinting and photographing the visitors, unless they come from one of the 27 countries for which the process is waived. Mexico isn't one of those countries.

Rusnock said the fingerprints and photographs are put into a database called IDENT. If the database identifies a visitor as illegally in the United States, but the person hasn't previously been deported or convicted of a crime in the U.S., the person is allowed to get on the plane.

If, however, like Palacios-Rivera, the person has been deported after committing a crime in the U.S., he'll be charged with the federal felony of illegal re-entry, Rusnock said.

Yunker said the arrest of Palacios-Rivera as he was trying to return to Mexico was the first such case she had seen in her 17 years as a defense lawyer.

But Rusnock said ICE agents have arrested a handful of other people at Denver International Airport under similar situations.

"It is the policy of the United States Attorney's Office to prosecute previously convicted sex offenders who illegally return to the United States after being deported, regardless of where they are caught," said Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Exit procedures under US-VISIT are being tested at about a dozen U.S. airports. Besides DIA, they include Baltimore-Washington, Chicago O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle-Tacoma and San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to the Customs and Border Protection web site, www.cbp.gov.

Countries whose citizens are exempt from being fingerprinted and photographed when they enter and leave the U.S. with up-to-date passports are Andorra, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, according to the Customs and Border Protection web site.

US-VISIT stands for U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology.

Palacios-Rivera is scheduled to be sentenced in April.