More than 100 immigrants the Obama administration released back into the community went on to be charged with subsequent murders, according to government data released Monday that raises new questions about whether immigration authorities are doing enough to detail illegal immigrants awaiting deportation.
In one case, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted its agents didn’t find out about an illegal immigrant’s death threats and court injunctions against him — which should have put him back in detention — until after the man was accused of a new murder.
That case, involving Apolinar Altamirano, is the latest instance of someone who’d been through the Obama administration deportation system but had been released, only to go on to commit major crimes.
ICE officials say they don’t regularly notify local authorities when they release someone, and don’t have a way of finding out from those authorities whether someone has gotten in trouble with the law again, so they didn’t know whether Mr. Altamirano’s $10,000 bond should have been revoked.
“ICE was not aware of the injunctions against Mr. Altamirano until after his January 22, 2015 arrest for first-degree murder, armed robbery and related offenses,” the agency said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, and Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican in whose state the murder occurred.
All told, 121 immigrants who were held but eventually released by ICE went on to commit “homicide-related offenses,” the agency said.
It said 33 of those were ordered by immigration courts and another 24 were released because of a 2001 Supreme Court decision capping the time an immigrant can be detained to six months. But a majority of the releases were discretionary, meaning ICE had the option of keeping them detained.
The Washington Times reported last week that most of those released on electronic monitoring violated some condition of their release — though few actually were deemed serious enough to have their release revoked.
Don Rosenberg, whose son was killed in a traffic accident by an illegal immigrant driving without a license, said the government shows a lack of willpower to deport people and to do it quickly.
“These people can and should be deported. We have that option and we don’t want to take it, and this is what happens,” he said. “I guess until somebody who has the responsibility to make these decisions has one of their loved-ones killed, it’s going to continue to happen.”
In the case of Mr. Altamirano, he’d been put in deportation proceedings on Jan. 3, 2013, and was released after posting bond four days later. His first hearing before the immigration court wasn’t until April 9, 2014, and he was still awaiting a final deportation order in January this year when he was arrested for shooting a convenience store clerk in Mesa, Arizona.
Mr. Grassley and Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican and chairman of the immigration subcommittee, are seeking answers from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Secretary of State John Kerry.
In Mr. Kerry’s case, the senators want to know why he hasn’t done more to put pressure on other countries to take back their immigrants when the U.S. wants to deport them. Under that 2001 Supreme Court ruling, known as the Zadvydas case, if other countries won’t accept their citizens, the U.S cannot usually detain them for longer than six months. Every year, thousands of immigrants are put back on the streets because of Zadvydas.
Republicans have long pressured the State Department — under both President George W. Bush and now under President Obama — to use diplomatic tools such as denying visas to top officials try to force other countries to take their citizens back.
The Times reported that ICE releases hundreds of Cuban criminals into U.S. communities every year because the island nation refuses to take them back.
ICE admitted in its letter to Mr. Grassley that it has no system
for alerting local authorities when a criminal is released onto their streets.
ICE admitted in its letter to Mr. Grassley that it has no system
for alerting local authorities when a criminal is released onto their streets.
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