(Washington Times) – 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been revoked.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.
http://www.teaparty.org/121-murders-commited-by-illegals-released-by-obama-103318/?promocode=tpo-4778433&utm_source=newsemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tpo-4778433
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