Two New Haven immigrants have been locked up as part of a regional sweep of convicted criminals who’ve violated immigration law, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Wednesday.
ICE arrested 40 people in Connecticut and five in Massachusetts between Friday and Monday, according to ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein.
It was the second time in five years that ICE has conducted a sweep of immigrants after clashing with local officials over immigration policy.
All just a coincidence, according to ICE.
Forty-four of the arrestees in the latest sweep had been previously convicted of a state or federal crime were living in the U.S. without legal permission, according to a press release ICE sent Wednesday evening. They were arrested administratively for violating immigration law. The remaining arrestee had two outstanding arrest warrants in New York and Texas.
Feinstein did not have details on the nature of the New Haveners’ arrests. He said ICE would not release their names, because the arrests are administrative. They will be held at an ICE detention facility pending removal proceedings before an immigration judge, he said.
City officials and neighborhood activists contacted Wednesday said they had no information.
The arrests were attributed not to Secure Communities, the ICE initiative that launched last week over outcry from New Haven immigrant activists and the mayor. Rather, Feinstein said they came as part of an “ongoing effort” of ICE’s “Criminal Alien Program.”
The program “targets serious criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, such as those charged with or convicted of homicide, rape, robbery, kidnapping, major drug offenses and threats to national security,” according to ICE’s release.
According to the release: “Forty-four of the individuals taken into custody had prior criminal convictions, including 18 aliens who had multiple criminal convictions. Additionally, 24 of those arrested had felony convictions. Many of these criminal aliens had prior convictions for serious or violent crimes, such as indecent assault and battery of a child, sexual assault, possessing and selling dangerous drugs, drunken driving and larceny charges.”
(After one operation last June in Georgia, an ICE agent himself was charged with drunk driving: He said he’d had “six or seven beers” celebrating with a fellow agent.)
ICE gave the following description of the arrestees: “there were 38 men and seven women who are nationals of the following countries: one from Bosnia, two from Brazil, one from Canada, one from Colombia, five from the Dominican Republic, one from El Salvador, one from England, one from Guatemala, one from Guyana, one from Haiti, one from Honduras, 17 from Jamaica, two from Mexico, one from Montserrat, two from Peru, one from the Philippines, three from Poland, one from Portugal, one from Russia and one from Tanzania. They range in ages from 21 to 57.”
Tensions have developed between ICE officials and the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy over the past two weeks over the rollout of Secure Communities. The Malloy administration has expressed skepticism over whether the program would target truly dangerous criminals.
Wednesday evening, Malloy’s point person on the issue, Michael Lawlor, was taking a wait-and-see posture on the latest sweep.
“The governor’s position has been very clear: Immigration officials should be identifying serious criminals, like terrorists, and deporting them. If that’s what’s happening here, everyone would applaud them,” said Lawlor, the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice.
He was asked if he thinks that’s in fact what happened here.
“We’ll find out,” he said.
New Haven’s mayor and police chief have also been openly critical of the Safe Communities roll-out. They held a press conference last week blasting the program.
In June 2007, the mayor drew ICE’s ire when the city approved an immigrant-friendly ID card program aimed at helping immigrants integrate into the community and avoid becoming crime victims. Within a day and a half of the program’s approval, ICE swept through the Fair Haven neighborhood rounding up 31 Latinos allegedly here illegally. Subsequently released emails revealed the agency’s animus toward New Haven’s efforts. This month the agency agreed to pay $350,000 to 11 targets of that raid who sued the agency for violating their constitutional rights. Read about that here.
