Fresno immigrant groups say ICE targets more people at their homes

BY ANDREA CASTILLO
The Fresno Bee November 6, 2014

Local immigrant rights groups say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is targeting an increasing number of unauthorized immigrants at their homes.

Representatives from Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño and CASA UNIRsaid during a news conference Thursday that ICE agents target unauthorized immigrants who have minor criminal charges. The agents show up at immigrants’ homes without a warrant, they said, and detain them for deportation.

Leonel Flores, director of CASA UNIR, said the strategy appears new, in the wake of the California Trust Act, which was signed into law in 2013. The Trust Act limits local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said the targeting of unauthorized immigrants at their homes, called “fugitive operations,” is nothing new and completely different from detainers placed on immigrants at local jails.

Certain immigrants are prioritized for removal, including people with serious criminal histories or those previously deported.

Those removals don’t require criminal warrants, she said, because they are administrative arrests through the immigration court system.

“They’re not random,” she said. “These are people we specifically know that we have a reason to target.”

Julia Harumi Mass, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California, said she has heard many stories of unauthorized immigrants being picked up at home after some contact — often minor — with the local criminal justice system.

She said she’s heard more of those stories within the last year or so, but couldn’t speculate as to why.

Contact Andrea Castillo: acastillo@fresnobee.com, (559) 441-6279 or @andreamcastillo on Twitter.

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