Thread: Fairfax rape case leads to national database upgrade

Posted at 12:15 PM ET, 01/17/2012

Fairfax rape case leads to national database upgrade

By Tom Jackman

The actions of convicted rapist, gang member and illegal immigrant Salvador Portillo-Saravia of Sterling led to an upgrade of the national fingerprint database. (Courtesy of Fairfax County Police)

In January of 2011, as Fairfax County police were searching for an illegal immigrant who had raped an eight-year-old girl in Centreville, they found that the man had been in the Loudoun County jail a month earlier and released. Loudoun sheriff’s deputies had checked the man through the national Secure Communities database, and even though he’d been deported in 2003, his fingerprints weren’t in there and no flag was raised.

More digging revealed that untold thousands of fingerprints from deportees prior to 2005 had never been digitized, and were sitting on cards in file cabinets. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) took up the cause, and on Tuesday he announced that $5 million in funding to digitize the fingerprints of all criminal illegal aliens was included in the upcoming budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

“This tragic incident identified a critical shortcoming in the Secure Communities program,” Wolf said in a press release, referring to the federal IDENT database that all jails in Virginia, and most nationwide, check to see if new inmates have immigration violations. “Unfortunately, many local law enforcement agencies were unaware of this gap in the system and that manual searches were still necessary.”

The rapist, Salvador Portillo-Saravia, 30, an MS-13 gang member from Sterling, pleaded guilty in October to rape and sodomy of a victim under the age of 13. He is scheduled to be sentenced next month. He had visited a woman on the day after Christmas 2010 in Centreville, and then assaulted the girl in her own home, Fairfax police said. He was later captured in Houston.

Fairfax rape case leads to national database upgrade - The State of NoVa - The Washington Post

Fairfax rapist, whose arrest exposed immigration data gap, pleads guilty

By Tom Jackman, Thursday, July 26, 4:46 PM
The Washington Post

The man who illegally reentered the country and raped an eight-year-old Fairfax County girl in 2010, exposing a large gap in federal immigration databases, pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal immigration violation, though he is already serving a 25-year prison sentence for the rape.

Salvador Portillo-Saravia, 30, a native of El Salvador and a member of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang, entered the country illegally in 2000 and was deported in 2003, immigration officials said. But his fingerprints, taken with rolled ink on a file card in 2003, were not entered into the national IDENT computer database.

Portillo-Saravia was picked up by Loudoun County sheriff’s deputies in November 2010 for being drunk in public. But when he was run through the national Secure Communities database, no red flag was raised for his previous deportation, and he was released. The sexual assault occurred a month later.

The Washington Post revealed in January 2011, while Portillo-Saravia was still at large, that most fingerprints taken before 2005 were done the old-fashioned ink-rolled way, and an unknown number of the 751,000 people deported from 2001 to 2005 were not in the IDENT database.

Earlier this year, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, successfully allocated $5 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to begin digitizing the paper fingerprint files.

Portillo-Saravia was arrested in Houston in February 2011. He was found guilty in Fairfax County Circuit Court of rape and sodomy of a child under 13 years old, and in February 2012 he was given a 50-year total sentence on the two counts, with 25 years suspended.

Portillo-Saravia was then turned over to federal authorities, and he pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of illegally reentering the country after deportation. He faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison at his sentencing on August 31.

Fairfax rapist, whose arrest exposed immigration data gap, pleads guilty - The Washington Post