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Officials failed to check teen's status until after girl's abduction

By Missy Stoddard
Staff Writer
Posted May 28 2005


Despite Milagro Cunningham's arrests for burglary before he allegedly raped an 8-year-old girl and left her for dead in a trash container last weekend, no one inquired about his immigration status until after the girl's abduction, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said Friday.

"We were queried about him earlier this week for the first time," said Michael Gilhooly of the Law Enforcement Support Center, an investigative branch of ICE. "Our agents have placed a hold on him."











Cunningham, 17, came to the United States on a temporary visa in 2003 and never returned to his native Bahamas, said Dean Boyd, an ICE spokesman in Washington D.C.

"As a result of this recent tragedy, we were informed of this and we have placed a detainer on this individual so upon completion of litigation, this person would be turned over to us and placed into removal proceedings," Boyd said.

Cunningham is charged as an adult with six felony counts that could land him in prison for life. He made his first appearance in adult court Friday. A judge appointed a public defender and ordered him held without bond.

Since Cunningham was booked into the Juvenile Assessment Center, not the county jail, at the time of his arrest, his immigration status remained off the radar screens of federal authorities. If an undocumented immigrant is booked into the jail, ICE is notified and a detainer is issued, said Col. Keith Chambers, director of corrections for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

Though Cunningham's information was readily available through the Law Enforcement Support Center system, no one ever asked.

The Law Enforcement Support Center, based in Vermont, is a conduit for law enforcement agencies nationwide seeking information about a person's immigration status.

Using a secure database called the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, any police officer, through a mobile data terminal or police dispatcher, can ask for an immigration query. The information is sent back to the agency electronically.

Florida law enforcement agencies are intimately familiar with the system: This month, more than 6,000 queries came from the state, more than twice the number of inquiries from Texas and second only to California, according to Gilhooly.

Minors are included in the database.

But as a matter of course, the Department of Juvenile Justice, which runs the Juvenile Assessment Center where Cunningham was first taken, doesn't ask about a youth's immigration status, said Tom Denham, a DJJ spokesman.

"We'd have to call Vermont on every kid we booked into the JAC," Denham said. "At some point during the court procedure, it will come out."

And at the street level, arresting officers typically don't get involved in immigration inquiries, sheriff's spokesman Paul Miller said.

"They're worried about getting that person off the street," Miller said. "If a person is in custody, they realize we have an automatic fingerprinting system and they know they are going to be matched."

Even in cases where it's known that a juvenile is in the country illegally, it's no guarantee the issue will be addressed.

Before the 9-11 terrorist attacks, immigration officials repeatedly declined to get involved with juveniles, said Jeanne Howard, the assistant state attorney in charge of the county's juvenile unit.

"We were always told they had no facilities to house a juvenile and we had not been successful in returning a juvenile back home," Howard said. "I don't know if in the last few years things have changed. We have [undocumented immigrants] arrested as juveniles all the time. It would be wonderful if they would put detainers on them and move them out."

Though Cunningham was enrolled in the Palm Beach County public schools for a time, federal law prohibits the school system from asking about a student's immigration status. A child needs only to show proof of birth, immunization and residency to attend public school.

"We wouldn't know and can't know," district spokesman Nat Harrington said. "It's not an area we are allowed to or supposed to get into."

Missy Stoddard can be reached at mstoddard@sun-sentinel.com or 561-832-2895.