ICE representative: We aim to detain criminals, not law-abiding immigrants

Sanctuary policies are hailed by government leaders as compassionate, but according to Tanya Roman, public affairs officer for the Alaska, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington branch of U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), they have led to serious violent crimes in the area. Roman says such policies prevent ICE from picking up dangerous criminals upon their release from jail.

In a recent press release, the Northwest branch of ICE identified several different cases of murder, rape, and assault committed or allegedly committed by illegal immigrants after their release from Washington and Oregon jails. If ICE had been notified that the people were being released, she told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson, the agency could have detained them in custody until an immigration hearing.

For example, said writer Jason Hopkins, who examined these cases for The Daily Signal, Rosalio Ramos-Ramos, who had previously been deported four times, went on to massacre his cousin after he was released from a Washington jail in 2017, without notification to the federal agency.

“Because of sanctuary laws, he was not handed over to ICE … he was able to get out; low and behold, he actually stabbed his cousin to death afterwards, decapitated the body, and tried to hide the it in a dumpster,” Hopkins said.

Dori | Thanks to sanctuary policies, double-rapist was free to re-attack victim

“We wish we had a better opportunity to help prevent some of that, but our ICE officers will continue to move forward and seek these individuals and try to remove them and make sure they have their day in court, to try to prevent whatever horrible instances like this that we can prevent,” Roman said.

Roman pointed to the case of a recent convicted rapist who was released from jail on the order to go back to Mexico, but before returning to Mexico, allegedly sought out and brutally assaulted his previous rape victim. She said that ICE agents were not made aware of his release, and that there was no record of him even in the system. ICE has documentation of every legal immigrant.

“ICE was not notified that that guy was even in jail and we have no immigration history on him,” she said. “So, if we are not given access to local jails as we once were, we are not able to go in there and speak to the criminal aliens and other criminals and just determine what their status is. So our mission is hindered.”

This, she said, could also mean that ICE is prevented from finding out if an immigrant assumed to be here illegally is in fact a legal immigrant.

ICE presence in jails

In the past, before the establishment of sanctuary policies, 90 percent of ICE enforcement and removal officers worked in jails, with only the remaining 10 percent on the streets. This, Roman said, is because the people whom ICE is mainly interested in deporting are those who have committed serious crimes, not those who are simply here to work and feed their families.

“There is this misconception that we are out hunting everybody, everybody we think is here illegally, we’re out hunting them, or we’re raiding businesses or things like that,” she said. “That’s not the case — our priority is criminal aliens.”

The problem with ICE being kept out of jails by sanctuary laws, she said, is that agents are then forced to go out on the streets, where they may find perfectly law-abiding people who happened to come here illegally. In that case, agents are bound follow protocol by detaining those people, even though they are not criminals.

“If that happens we have to react to that — we have federal officers who have a sworn duty to react if they come across somebody who is not in the country legally,” she said.

Now, Roman said, ICE is not even asking for a presence in jails like before, but simply for notification when criminals who have immigrated illegally are being released from custody.

“We’re just saying, ‘Hey, give us a call before you open the gate so that we can be there to pick up these people who has already proven themselves to be dangerous to the community,'” she said.

The political game

The bill signed by Governor Jay Inslee to turn Washington into an official sanctuary state was a PR moment for Inslee’s presidential campaign.

“This is something the Progressive base increasingly wants — maybe it’s some sort of reaction to President Donald Trump and his crackdown on illegal immigration,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins added that Washington was not the only state to pass such a policy — Colorado and Connecticut passed similar laws not long after that will prevent ICE from working with law enforcement and jails.

ICE tends to get a reputation in the media as a group of monsters, but Roman said that agents are simply federal government workers fulfilling their duty to carry out federal laws.

“We as federal employees, we’ve taken an oath as well, we are only doing the duty that we swore to do — these laws are made and upheld by Congress, so I what would say to the public that if you don’t agree with the laws, then you need to change them,” Roman said. “But until they’re changed, we are the ones who have been told we need to enforce these laws.”