The team of federal agents gathered before dawn in an empty strip mall parking lot in Riverside.

As they readied their guns and strapped on black Kevlar vests, the leader of the operation briefed them on the day's targets: several immigrants with criminal records who were in the country illegally.

One of them, 32-year-old Hugo Medina, was convicted of driving under the influence in 2010, of petty theft in 2014 and of drug possession earlier this year, according to court documents.

He was released from Riverside County jail in June after jail officials declined to honor a request from immigration authorities to transfer him to their custody.

Agents had been casing his house -- a tidy bungalow on the city's north side -- for several days.

On cue, they stormed the property early Wednesday, guns drawn. Five minutes later, Medina was led out, shoeless and dressed in cutoff shorts. Inside, his mother, wife and three young children sobbed.

It used to be simpler for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to locate and deport immigrants who had been convicted of crimes. The agency would contact local jails and ask that such inmates be held until an ICE van could pick them up.

But last year a federal judge found that practice illegal, prompting hundreds of counties to stop honoring the detainer requests. As a result, ICE officials say they have to rely on costly and dangerous manhunts like the one conducted Wednesday in Riverside.

The agency's Fugitive Operation teams carry out raids across the country every morning.

Originally formed to locate immigrants who had failed to comply with a judge's deportation order, the program is increasingly being used to find immigrants with criminal convictions who have

recently been let out of jail. Of the more than 27,000 people whom authorities arrested last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, 2014, about 78% had criminal convictions, according to ICE data.

"It would be so much safer for the community if we took custody of this individual in the jail," said David Marin, deputy director of ICE's Los Angeles field office. "It would have taken us two officers

to do that, as opposed to the eight or nine that we have out here now."

ICE officials have held up the agency's new Priority Enforcement Program as a cheaper and safer alternative to dramatic neighborhood raids. Under the new program,

ICE asks jails to notify the agency when potentially deportable inmates are being released from custody, and occasionally asks jails to hold detainees it considers especially dangerous.

Immigrant advocates don't buy that argument.

"It's a form of blackmail," said Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, an immigrant rights group. "They're saying, 'Acquiesce to this bad program or we'll do something worse.'"

Newman and others say the agency's new jail program is simply a rebranding of a controversial earlier initiative, Secure Communities, the post-release detainer program that the federal judge found

unconstitutional. Advocates say thousands of U.S. citizens were wrongfully detained and many immigrants with little or no criminal record were deported as a result of the program.

Since counties stopped honoring ICE detainer requests last year, the number of deportations has plummeted, along with the number of people held in immigrant detention, according to ICE data.

The relationship between local police and federal immigration officials has been under scrutiny this summer after several high-profile crimes committed by immigrants with criminal histories.


Immigration agents had sought custody of a Mexican immigrant charged in the shooting death
ICE Relying on Elaborate Immigration Raids | Officer.com