Thread: Judge vents his frustration

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/ ... 29,00.html

Pair of illegal immigrants facing jail time for crimes on receiving end of anger

By JAMIE SATTERFIELD, satterfield@knews.com
December 5, 2006


With back-to-back hearings Monday involving illegal immigrants whose crimes included more than just sneaking across the border, forgive this federal judge for blowing his top.

"I mean stay out of here," Senior U.S. District Court Judge James H. Jarvis blasted from the bench, his voice raised and his tone frustrated, as he sentenced an admitted illegal immigrant smuggler.

"If you're legal, you are welcome," Jarvis told Vicente Miguel-Velasco. "Don't you come back here illegally."

Miguel-Velasco's track record made Jarvis' warning sound a bit hollow. After all, he has crossed the Mexican border illegally at least twice and has been deported at least once already.

"There are people that know the way," Miguel-Velasco responded when the judge pressed him on how he sneaked into the United States.

Miguel-Velasco was nabbed in Knoxville in April after he crashed his van on Interstate 40. There were at least a dozen illegal immigrants crammed inside the vehicle at the time.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Schmutzer has said fellow illegal immigrants paid Miguel-Velasco as much as $500 each to ferry them from California to jobs in East Tennessee.

Miguel-Velasco, who said he has lived in California with a wife and children for more than a decade, seemed taken aback to learn that he could have faced a maximum 10-year prison term.

"What ought the penalty be, putting a bunch of people in a van like chickens and carry them across the country?" Jarvis asked him.

Schmutzer urged an 18-month prison term, the top end of a penalty range for Miguel-Velasco calculated by the U.S. Probation Office.

"We think it's a serious offense," Schmutzer said.

Assistant Federal Defender Kim Tollison urged Jarvis to turn Miguel-Velasco, who has been jailed since April, over to authorities to be deported.

"What I'm asking you to do is basically give him time served and send him back to Mexico," Tollison said.

Jarvis instead imposed a prison term of a year and a day, a move that could mean Miguel-Velasco will serve only a few more months behind bars before he is deported.

Illegal immigrant Angel Guiterrez-Nieto did not fare as well in his trip before Jarvis' bench Monday. In his case, Jarvis approved a deal between Assistant U.S. Attorney David Jennings and defense attorney Steve Shope for an 87-month prison term for Guiterrez-Nieto.

Unlike Miguel-Velasco, fellow illegal immigrant Guiterrez-Nieto was peddling heroin and was caught with a pound of the drug stashed in a false bottom of one of his shoes.

He was one of more than a half dozen people nabbed as part of a probe by the FBI and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation of a Mexico-to-Nashville-to-Knoxville heroin ring.

TBI agents very nearly missed finding the stash of heroin in Guiterrez-Nieto's shoe, sending him off to jail with the powerful opiate still stashed there before translated wire-tap recordings revealed his secret.

"I know that I committed crime, and I'm willing to pay whatever penalties you give me," Guitterez-Nieto told Jarvis.

"Well said," the judge replied.

"If you're legal, you are welcome," Jarvis told Vicente Miguel-Velasco. "Don't you come back here illegally."

I couldn't have said it better myself.