Thread: AZ: Crisscrossing state, team has arrested 400-plus in 2010

Crisscrossing state, team has arrested 400-plus in 2010
Lone AZ squad tracks fugitives here illegally


* (63) Comments

Brady McCombs Arizona Daily Star
Posted: Tuesday, June 1, 2010 12:00 am

Three Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers walk briskly between two buildings in a sprawling apartment complex on Tucson's south side.

As they approach a parking lot, one says, "There's the car."

The trio - wearing black bulletproof vests with "ICE" on the back - sprint toward a red car with its brake lights on. The officers surround the vehicle with their weapons drawn and begin shouting.

The man inside, wearing shorts and a Lakers jersey, exits slowly and puts his hands behind his head.

It's near dusk on an early summer day in Tucson, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Arizona fugitive operations team has just caught their man: Noe Nubes-Nidez, 35, one of about 2,500 fugitive illegal immigrants in Arizona and more than 500,000 nationwide. They are fugitives because they were issued deportation orders by an immigration judge but never showed up.

Nubes-Nidez was a U.S. legal permanent resident when he was caught with nearly 36 pounds of marijuana and $241,000 in cash in his car at the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales on Nov. 17, 1997. Six years later, an immigration judge ordered him deported. He appealed but lost in 2004.

While in Tucson recently, the Phoenix-based ICE fugitive operations team targeted him due to his criminal record of smuggling drugs and because they had solid information about his whereabouts. The team's priority is finding those who have committed crimes besides being here illegally.

Nationwide, arrests of people with outstanding deportation orders have increased each of the past six years - a result of the agency's increasing the number of fugitive operations teams to 104 nationwide today, up from eight in 2003.

There's only one team in Arizona, mainly because the state has a small population of fugitive illegal immigrants, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Vincent Picard. The team works mostly in Phoenix, but makes regular trips to Tucson, Flagstaff, Nogales and other corners of the state.

So far this year, the Arizona team has made more than 400 arrests of fugitive illegal immigrants, 182 of whom had additional criminal records, Picard said.

Nationwide, more than 13,600 have been arrested, 7,009 of whom had criminal records, he said. Agents made more than 34,000 such arrests each of the past two years.

"The order of removal from the an immigration judge," said the Arizona fugitive operations team leader, Martin Byrum, "never goes away."

Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com.


http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/ ... 6a7e8.html

These Mexican criminals scoff at our law. Soon, Americans may have to take more drastic measures and they won't be scoffed at.