ICE is Quietly Releasing Violent Criminal Aliens Back onto American Streets

On whose orders and why is still murky. Maria Sacchetti wrties in the Boston Globe:

They were among the nation’s top priorities for deportation, criminals who were supposed to be sent back to their home countries. But instead they were released, one by one, in secret across the United States. Federal officials said that many of the criminals posed little threat to the public, but did little to verify whether that was true.

It wasn’t.

A Globe review of 323 criminals released in New England from 2008 to 2012 found that as many as 30 percent committed new offenses, including rape, attempted murder, and child molestation — a rate that is markedly higher than Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have suggested to Congress in the past.

The names of these criminals have never before been made public and are coming to light now only because the Globe sued the federal government for the list of criminals immigration authorities returned to neighborhoods across the country. A judge ordered the names released in 2013, and the Globe then undertook the work that the federal government didn’t, scouring court records to find out how many released criminals reoffended.

The Globe has also published, in conjunction with this story, a searchable database of the thousands of names that were disclosed to the news organization, so that crime victims, law enforcement officials, and managers of sex offender registries — who are often unaware of these releases — can find out if the criminals may still be in the United States.

The review does not indicate that immigrants are any more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans — and in fact studies have shown that not to be the case. But the review reveals the damage inflicted on victims by criminals who were ordered to be deported when their sentences were complete, and were not, and it raises questions about how the government handled their cases.

The public rarely learns about ICE’s decisions to release criminals until something goes wrong — because immigration is the only law enforcement system in the United States that keeps such records secret.

ICE maintains that immigration records are generally private, and therefore exempt from disclosure under federal law. But others say the public should know who is making these decisions and why.

“There’s a serious question of who ICE represents. Who do they work for?” said Chester Fairlie, a lawyer for the mother of Casey Chadwick, a Connecticut woman murdered last year by a released criminal — a case that is intensifying calls for reform in ICE. “Public safety should trump any claim of privilege or confidentiality. It doesn’t come from statute. It doesn’t come from law. It comes from ICE deciding that that’s how it’s going to do things.”

Immigration officials have long insisted that the decision to release criminals — some of whom initially came to this country legally — is often out of their hands because the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the government cannot jail immigrants indefinitely. If immigration officials cannot deport them after six months, the court said, they should generally set them free.

“So to sit there and say that the proud women and men of law enforcement in ICE are choosing to release criminals is absolutely unforgivable,” ICE Director Sarah Saldaña told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in April, after lawmakers grilled her about releasing criminals in the United States. “And they do not go around trying to put criminals on the street.”

often, that’s where they end up.

The Globe found that a Massachusetts man was supposed to be deported after he served jail time for bashing his ex-girlfriend on the head with a hammer — but ICE released him in October 2009. Three months later, he found the ex-girlfriend and stabbed her repeatedly. A Rhode Island man who had served prison time for a home invasion was also released from immigration detention in 2009; five years later, he was arrested for attacking his former girlfriend. In 2010, ICE released a man with a lengthy criminal record in Maine; a few months later he grabbed a man outside a 7-Eleven, held a knife to the man’s throat, and robbed him.

Some members of Congress appear to be losing patience with ICE’s argument that it is powerless to stop these releases. Critics say ICE could seek civil commitment for mentally ill immigrants who commit crimes, arrest reoffenders, and ask the Department of State to use diplomatic means to punish nations such as Haiti, China, and Jamaica when they refuse to take back their own citizens.

At the House oversight hearing on April 28, committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said ICE’s decisions to release criminals who can’t be deported are leading to thousands of preventable crimes, according to ICE’s own statistics. The recent reoffenses include more than 130 murders or attempted murders since 2010, according to a letter ICE provided in February to Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

“What’s going on with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is one of the most infuriating things I think I’ve seen in this government yet,” Chaffetz said. To Saldaña, he added, after referring to crime victims in these cases, “How do you look those people in the eye?”