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Threat mailed to judge
BY DARYL KHAN
STAFF WRITER

March 14, 2005, 7:53 AM EST

An immigration judge who has been receiving threatening letters at her Newark offices in recent months received a letter of an "alarming nature" at her home Saturday afternoon, law enforcement sources said.

Judge Esmeralda Cabrera, who works at the U.S. Immigration Court in Newark, received the letter in a batch of normal mail delivered to her Staten Island home, the sources said.

She had recently received a number of letters that sparked an investigation by federal authorities. That investigation, which remains ongoing, added a new, personal dimension on Saturday.

"These are public officials. It's not rare they receive threats," a law enforcement source said. "They get threats all the time, all the time."

However, sources said, this latest threatening letter crossed a boundary between her public role as an official to her province as a private citizen.

"Once it goes to the residence it can be a lot more alarming," a law enforcement source said.

A person who picked up the phone last night at a number listed as Cabrera's said the judge did not live there.

Law enforcement sources would not describe the content of the page-long typed letter but did say it was alarming, sources said.

When Cabrera opened the letter she contacted the police. The police department's bomb squad and elite Emergency Services Units responded to the scene as a precaution.

The responding officers took the letter as evidence and were planning to turn it over to federal authorities who were going to examine it and add it to the larger investigation of threats she has received at her office, sources said.

Cabrera makes life-altering decisions in her normal course of work. She enforces the controversial Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility law, passed in 1996 as a response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The law has resulted in a sharp increase in asylum seekers who end up in detention for long stretches, awaiting approval of their requests. She has the power to deport them.

The menacing letters addressed to Cabrera come as law enforcement agencies closely examine security protocols for the roughly 2,000 federal judges and magistrates nationwide in the wake of a murderous rampage by a defendant in Atlanta and the killing of a judge's husband and mother in Chicago earlier this month.