Thread: Houston: Feds launch roundup of fugitive illegal immigrants

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Feds launch roundup of fugitive illegal immigrants

ICE: There are 38,000 criminal illegals in Houston

11:03 PM CDT on Friday, May 9, 2008

By Vicente Arenas / 11 News


Several teams of federal agents from here and across the country are hitting the streets of Houston searching for fugitive illegal immigrants.

The hunt in Houston began a few hours before sunrise on Tuesday.

Half an hour into their operation, Immigration Customs Enforcement agents catch a bad guy.

ICE officers say the man they arrested had committed several violent crimes and assaulted his former wife.

A woman, who agents identified as his current wife, walked away when 11 News tried to ask her about her husband’s citizenship status.

ICE officers say there are an estimated 38,000 known illegal immigrants with criminal histories in Houston.

It is an astonishing number and catching bad guys, officials say, is not easy.

They say fugitives on the run constantly change their addresses and work locations.

Catching the fugitive immigrants takes hours of surveillance and planning too.

At another location, agents look for yet another fugitive.

They didn’t catch the man they were looking for, but half an hour later an illegal immigrant from Columbia is in cuffs. Another from Nigeria is about to get deported.

Once the fugitive illegal immigrants are arrested they are brought to a processing center in north Houston.

Most of them have been there before.

This time though, they won’t be released.

What happens inside the facility?

11 News got a rare behind the scenes look at how agents identify criminals.

Agents use computerized fingerprinting and record checks in identifying the worst of the worst.

Greg Palmore is with ICE Houston. “It’s important for us to remove a lot of these individuals particularly because particularly because they have committed crimes. They are fugitives they are abconders. There are many names for them. But the bottom line is they don’t have a valid status in the United States.â€

If these santuary citys and their corrupt governments did not exist we would not be in the situation of these released illegal criminals harming innocent Americans .

Yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death
71000 Americans killed by illegals since 9-11

May 9, 2008, 10:52PM
Federal agents capture fugitives
89 immigrants arrested in surge await processing


By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle


Government agents will work today processing 89 illegal immigrants arrested in Houston during a four-day "surge" operation this week, an effort to reduce a backlog of 30,000 immigration fugitives in the area, officials said.

"We're continuing to move forward with their removal process," said Greg Palmore, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.

"We're doing this every day; this is not an isolated surge," he added. "There are four active fugitive operations teams that are out there working in the same capacity every day."

The operation involved four teams of agents from the ICE office in Houston, and eight more teams brought in from offices in Dallas, San Antonio and El Paso, Palmore said. About 60 agents took part in the operation.

During the operation, which began early Tuesday and ended Friday, a total of 89 illegal immigrants were arrested, including 28 who had criminal convictions. Of the total apprehended, 77 had orders of removal and another 12 were encountered during the operation, Palmore said.

Teams of agents spread out across Houston during the operation, arresting immigrants at their homes or their jobs.

One of those arrested Tuesday has been hospitalized, and is in fair condition, after medical screening at ICE processing facilities in north Houston indicated he was suffering from hypertension.

Fugitive operation teams in the Houston area have "30,000 cases assigned to this area and their goal is to get them all, or as many as they can, especially the criminals," Palmore said.

He was referring to immigration absconders who reside in the 52-county Houston field office's area of responsibility, which extends from the Louisiana border to Corpus Christi.

Kenneth Landgrebe field office director for ICE detentions and removals in Houston, stressed the operation was not part of "mass raids."

"These are not roundups," he said. "These are targeted individuals that have had their day in court and have refused or failed to leave as the courts have ordered."

Landgrebe said the removal operations are part of immigration enforcement mandated by Congress, which has provided funding to greatly increase the number of ICE fugitive teams across the country.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5769012.html

ICE: There are 38,000 criminal illegals in Houston

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May 10, 2008, 10:36PM
ICE's raids yield mixed results
4-day project to nab hundreds of fugitives ends with 89 arrests


By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

The arrest went exactly as the agents planned.

A few minutes after dawn, the Mexican citizen backed his new Chevy pickup out of the driveway onto the street, on the way to his job as a construction supervisor.

Within seconds, Reynaldo Campos, wanted for being in the country illegally, was boxed in by vehicles driven by immigration agents who, wearing flak jackets and guns drawn, ordered him out of the car and cuffed him.

It was a successful start to last Thursday's roundup of illegal immigrants, the third of a four-day operation to track down illegal immigrants who have gone underground after being ordered to leave the country.

It's a daunting task.

In Houston alone there are an estimated 30,000 immigrant fugitives, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nationally there are about 575,000.

Last week, ICE agents in the Houston Field Office's area of responsibility, which extends over 52 counties from Louisiana to Corpus Christi, cut that number by a small margin.

Before the operation began at dawn Tuesday, ICE officials were confident of apprehending hundreds of immigrants. But when it ended shortly before noon Friday, they had picked up 89, including 28 with criminal convictions.

"Well, we always hope for more, but we don't always get everybody we're looking for," said Kenneth Landgrebe, the ICE Field Office director for Detention and Removal in Houston.

"It's not a stagnant population. They move, addresses change, or there is little information to identify them. It's always a constantly moving target to identify and locate."

Landgrebe stressed that the fugitive operation, which was conducted by a dozen fugitive teams with 60 agents from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and El Paso, was not part of a ''mass raid" but an effort to deport immigrants who had their day in court, and lost.

"ICE is not doing indiscriminate raids through apartment complexes or on the streets," he said. "These are targeted individuals that we have investigated, and done research on, and tried to locate these individuals to apprehend and remove them from the United States."

The Houston Chronicle, and several other news organizations, were given an inside look at fugitive operations and techniques as reporters were allowed to accompany agents as they made arrests around the city.

One condition was that neither agents nor those arrested be identified without their consent.


Eluding authorities
The elusive nature of the immigrants became evident during the course of the operation. A number of leads the agents followed turned out to be dead ends, with information either outdated or wrong.

"These people are mobile, and transient, and Houston is more than likely a transit point," said one ICE official. "The other factor is they have a primary goal, as an absconder, to avoid the law. So they go underground."

In some cases, immigrants refused to allow agents to enter their homes. The arrest warrants carried by the agents did not allow them to enter without permission.

After arresting Campos early Thursday, agents went on to an upscale Houston apartment complex listed as the address of a cook from Morocco. But they learned he had moved out long ago.

At another apartment complex, a resident opened his door and was startled by six armed agents with a warrant for another immigrant. The agents had bad information, and were told the Nigerian they were searching for had never lived there.

But soon there was news crackling over the government radio. Other agents on the ICE team had tracked down an undocumented Colombian immigrant with a weapon's charge.

"Sometimes we'll go two or three days," without finding a fugitive, said field supervisor Hector McKenna. "It's called getting skunked. And sometimes we get five or six in a day."


Checking databases
McKenna, a former Marine who supervises one of the four detention teams in Houston, said a successful arrest requires checking databases, researching court documents, as well as surveillance.

When the operation began before dawn on Tuesday, McKenna and several members of his team took up positions outside the home of another Nigerian citizen. The 30-year-old man, who a Houston immigration judge had ordered to leave in November 2004, was later convicted of property theft, according to ICE records.

McKenna's agents had the immigrant under surveillance when he left for work each morning, knew his daily routine, and had followed him home the night before to make sure he would be there in the morning. And, because of the way he changed his route, they knew he was wary.

At 7:08 a.m., an agent reported the immigrant was on the move. "Target coming out of the house. Yellow shirt on."

But moments later, the immigrant looked over his shoulder, and walked back into the house. And for a long while, agents waited to see whether he would re-emerge, while debating whether they had been spotted.

"He's hinked man; I think he made you," McKenna radioed the officer who had parked across from the residence. "I mean, he's definitely cautious."


Search warrant
After waiting more than an hour, the agents knocked on the immigrant's door and asked him to surrender. When he refused, they began the process of obtaining a search warrant to enter the home.

Before noon, the immigrant decided to open the door and surrender to agents. During the wait, other members of McKenna's team detained others on their list.

"This is my team, and that's how they work — they're out there kicking butt," said McKenna, elated by the arrests of all five of their morning targets.

But he was candid about the challenges, and said his team apprehends, on average, only 32 to 37 percent of its targets.

"I'm not going to lie, a lot of times we have the address, and other info, that is cold ... the case goes cold, our leads are cold, and Houston is transitory," McKenna explained.

And there was some drama.

As agents arrested Jaime De Leon in the East End, they asked the Mexican immigrant to tie his pit bull to a fence. But when the dog's leash began to slip, the agents retreated to their cars until the immigrant's landlord arrived and took charge of the dog.

Some of those arrested last week vowed to return.

"I have to; I have little children here," explained a 40-year-old Mexican citizen arrested at the apartment complex where he is a maintenance worker.


'Free ride' home
And the immigrant, who ICE said was convicted of human trafficking and possession of marijuana, acknowledged the charges but said he had successfully completed probation. And he joked about his deportation as he sat in an ICE transport van early Tuesday.

"Now they're giving me a free ride to see my father and mother," he said, referring to parents in Mexico he hasn't seen in five years.

Asked whether he was worried about crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, he laughed, "They say it's hard, so I guess I'll see and later I'll let you know," he said.

But his arrest and detention placed his family in a precarious situation. He has been supporting an older daughter from a previous marriage, along with his second wife, her older son, and the couple's two infant sons.

"So tell me, how I'm going to support all of us," the daughter said at his home the next day. She said she is contemplating dropping out of college and looking for a second job.

And Campos, the construction supervisor arrested Thursday, is also thinking about returning to Houston if he is unable to contest his deportation.

"Well, all the bills are going to get behind if I don't come back," he said.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chr ... 70244.html

Originally Posted by jimpasz

ICE: There are 38,000 criminal illegals in Houston

Yea, I hope everyone noticed that. That doesn't even take into account the number of non-criminal illegals. This place has become a cesspool.

It will take years to get this mess straightened out so people cam be proud of this town again.

ICE: There are 38,000 criminal illegals in Houston

This is just Houston! How many are in Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, this list goes on and on! How many more Americans have to be victimized before our leaders will get off their ass and do something!

ICE should be conducting raids nonstop until this situation can be neutralized.

its extimated that because of the sanctuary policy that there could be as many as 450,000 illegals living in houston

Yea, I hope everyone noticed that. That doesn't even take into account the number of non-criminal illegals. This place has become a cesspool.

It will take years to get this mess straightened out so people cam be proud of this town again.

Yep, go into some parts of Houston (Antoine, SW and others) all you see is mejican flags all over tha place, families with at least five little anchor and mommy expecting another one and all the ills that come with it.

With secured borders and an enforced immigration system that is already codified and 'on the books'...we'd have 38,000 less illegal alien fugitives in Houston because they would never be here in the first place.