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Immigration agents change their tactics

By Vesna Jaksic
Staff Writer

November 24, 2006

Alicia Lemus said she was cleaning several North Stamford homes for a living before immigration officials warned the homeowners not to hire an illegal immigrant.

Lemus, who is here illegally from Guatemala, said she had a good relationship with the homeowners but they told her they were too scared to hire her after the phone calls. She said she has not secured work since then and is struggling to pay rent, food and the medical bills for her father, who is ill with cancer in Guatemala.

"I'm scared," Lemus, a mother of a 22-year-old daughter, said in Spanish. "I can't even feed myself."

Though Lemus said she has not heard directly from immigration officials, her case exemplifies what some immigration lawyers said is a new focus for enforcement officials - foreigners without criminal records who are here illegally and those who hire them.

Area lawyers said immigration officials also have arrested individuals during traffic stops, visits to Department of Motor Vehicles' offices and at a spot for day laborers in Danbury.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has typically focused on arresting foreigners who are here illegally and have a criminal record or have disobeyed an immigration judge's ruling to leave the country. But recently, ICE agents have detained foreign nationals who live illegally in Connecticut and other states and have no criminal records.

Some lawyers said the agents also are increasingly using techniques such as those in Lemus' case to make it difficult for the foreigner to remain in the country.

In September, ICE agents arrested 11 day laborers while they were looking for work in Danbury. The men, all from Ecuador, did not have criminal records, Paula Grenier, an ICE spokeswoman, said after the arrests. Several immigration lawyers said some clients have been detained by ICE agents during traffic stops along Interstate 91 because they could not prove they were here legally.

"Every three to six months I get a call from a family that they took their nanny," said Douglas Penn, a Stamford immigration lawyer.

A social worker once told him she regretted advising an immigrant to get a driver's license because the individual was apprehended when he showed up at the DMV, Penn said.

Bill Seymour, a spokesman for the state DMV, said the agency does not keep track of how often such arrests occur but estimated they take place weekly.

"We do a Social Security check and we also do checks with the immigration authority, and if someone is found to be in the country illegally, we hold them until the proper authorities arrive to deal with the matter," he said.

Lemus said the immigration officials did not contact her. But two of the homeowners she worked for, as well as Phil Berns, a Stamford immigration lawyer who heard her case, confirmed that an ICE agent contacted the homeowners.

Lemus said immigration officials started calling shortly after her former employer threatened she would tip them off about her illegal status.

Berns said the case is disturbing because it shows federal agents pursued a case involving one cleaning woman.

"This falls on the heels of ICE wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of scarce resources tracking down 11 day laborers in Danbury," he said, adding he was surprised ICE took the time to call the homeowners. "How many Americans check who's doing the dishes in a restaurant before they eat and who makes the bed when they stay in a hotel?"

ICE's Grenier did not return a message left last week seeking comment. A message left with another ICE official, Michael Gilhooly, this week, also was not returned.

But in September, after the arrests of the day laborers in Danbury, Grenier said ICE agents regularly arrest foreign nationals who are here illegally even though they may not have criminal records.

"We make arrests every day for individuals who violate immigration laws, and we do make arrests of those in the country illegally who do not have criminal records," she said.

An estimated 12 million people in the United States live here illegally, which is considered a civil violation.

Joan Friedland, an immigration policy attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, which works for immigrants' rights, said arrests of non-criminal foreign nationals have been in the spotlight in recent months, but it is difficult to say whether they are occurring more often or ICE is making more of them known. But Friedland, who is based in Washington, D.C., said federal agents should not focus on individuals without criminal records.

"I think it's a misguided use of resources," she said. "A lot of families are mixed - some people are undocumented and some people are documented. So some people get deported even though they are people you'd want to stay, who would be leaving families behind."