No, the governor of Illinois didn’t say that. A federal agent did — about the raids of immigrants in New Haven. Now his private machismo is public, too.
ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) Special Agent in Charge Bruce M. Foucart made the comment in the headline in an email sent on June 13, 2007, to an ICE agent named Bruce Chabourne.
The email was made public Wednesday by lawyers representing 32 New Haven immigrants swept up in raids that month. The lawyers have been obtaining internal FBI and ICE emails related to the raids under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) as part of their defense strategy of portraying the raids as the acts of overzealous federal agents giddily trampling on people’s rights.
The emails are being released in response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of two immigrants-rights groups, Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Accion. Previously released emails have suggested that the raids were partly motivated by a desire to punish New Haven for its embrace of undocumented immigrants, such as the passage of a first-of-its-kind immigrant-friendly municipal ID card. Click here to a read a previous story detailing some of those eye-opening emails.
The feds first swept up 29 immigrants on June 6, 2007 in predawn sweeps of Fair Haven and other area streets. They picked up three more immigrants a few days later.
Special Agent Foucart read about those subsequent arrests in this article in The New Haven Independent.
He shot off an email to ICE’s Bruce Chabourne. It began by citing the link in the Independent. Then Foucart wrote:
“Bruce
“Saw the ICE Clips re: New Haven…good job showing a set of balls by going back into the city and arresting 3 more people… you go boy! If you need help, let me know”
Click here to see the memo. It was printed on letterhead of Thuylieu T Kazazian, an ICE lawyer.
Lawyers representing the arrested immigrants made public a second memo Thursday, as well. This one listed the names of allegedly illegal immigrants with deportation orders whom ICE claimed it was looking for when it planned the New Haven raids.
Of the 32 people ICE ended up arresting in New Haven, only five turned out to be on that list. That’s central to the lawyers’ case, because they claim the sweeps were in fact a retaliatory effort to strike fear at random into the homes of immigrant families, that the claim that the feds were here looking primarily for the names on the official list was just a pretext.
Federal officials have repeatedly declined to comment on the emerging emails but have defended the raids and adamantly denied that they had anything to do with the ID cards. In the batch of memos reported on here, too, officials are quoted making those denials.
“Only five of those arrested were people with orders of deportation who were targeted by ICE for arrest,” observed Hunter Smith, a Yale Law School intern working with the defense team; “27 of the people arrested were bystanders, people ICE just ‘came across.’”
To date the government has deported two of the 32 people arrested in the raids. The names of those two did appear on the official target list. According to Hunter, “The other thirty individuals were all released on bond. The other three people with orders of deportation are still in New Haven and are still fighting their cases. One of these three has had an order of removal vacated and the government has now conceded that an independent order of deportation issued to her ‘does not exist.’ (She is still in proceedings, though, but a final outcome of her case may be known soon).”
Click here and here for previous Independent coverage of their court proceedings in Hartford.
I commend ICE for trying to enforce the immigration laws. Too bad the mayor of New Haven doesn't have the balls to do it.