On the heels of several reports documenting U.S. citizens who have been detained or even deported by federal immigration officers, a top Homeland Security Department official in November issued a memo that aims to guide his agency on what to do when a person suspected of being illegally in the country claims to be a citizen.
(The memo can be seen here.)
John Morton, Homeland Security's assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sent the memo, which instructs ICE employees that "In all cases, any uncertainty about whether the evidence is probative of U.S. Citizenship should weigh against detention."
(The memo supersedes a memo from November 2008, which superseded another memo from July 2008, which superseded a memo from May 2008.)
Aside from going deeper into the issue than previous guidance, the other differences are who issued the memo and to whom it's addressed.
The memos from November and July 2008 were issued by James T. Hayes Jr., the then-director of ICE's Office of Detention and Removal Operations, and sent to DRO's field office directors.
Morton's note didn't just go to the deportation officers and enforcement agents assigned to DRO. The recipients include special agents (through the 26 special agents in charge) and ICE attorneys (through the 26 chief counsels' offices). With it comes a sense of urgency and prioritization of such citizenship claims.
Morton's directive also instructs agents and officers to work with the local U.S. attorney's office to prosecute a person who lies about their citizenship claim.
(The government has shown its serious about prosecuting false claims, including asylum seekers.)
That the memo comes from Morton gives extra heft, and follows various media reports highlighting the issue.
CIR, in separate collaborations with the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones, reported that numerous detainees with valid or possible claims to U.S. citizenship have been detained and even deported in recent years. (Other reporting on the issue can be found here, here and here.)
ICE's new "Secure Communities" program that targets criminal aliens for deportation has also mistakenly identified thousands of U.S. citizens initially believed to be potentially subject to deportation.
More details on how ICE determines citizenship could become public through a lawsuit filed by one such U.S. citizen detained for seven months.
Vern Castillo, a native of Belize, became a naturalized U.S. citizen while he was in the U.S. Army. A few years after Castillo was honorably discharged from the military he ended up serving a short jail sentence following a domestic dispute with a girlfriend.
Instead of being released once his jail time was up, Castillo was detained by immigration officials who thought he was in the country illegally. An immigration judge didn't believe Castillo's protests that he was a citizen, and ordered the man deported. It was only after an appeals panel reviewed the case that immigration officials realized a mistake had been made in his file, and he was released.
Castillo filed suit in November 2008 against the agents. A federal judge in Tacoma recently ruled the case could move forward in part. The U.S. government has appealed that ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Settlement discussions are ongoing.
According to court records, Castillo (or his legal team) wants a lesson in how ICE agents and officers go about their business of determining whether someone in their custody is a U.S. citizen or not. They want to videotape a qualified operator showing them how database searches are conducted.
Among the things that could come to light are the policies, procedures and practices in determining, documenting and investigating citizenship and claims of citizenship. Castillo also wants to see the agency's logs, training materials and manuals on the topic, court records show.
An ongoing drug trial in U.S. District Court in El Paso, Texas, provides an uncommon glimpse into the violent battle for Juarez, just across the U.S.-Mexico border. The trial has had as many twists and turns as the Rio Grande, which splits these New Wild West towns into something like Heaven and Hell.
For more than a week in El Paso, witnesses have taken the stand and testified about the world of Mexican drug traffickers. The El Paso Times has reported that their testimony has flashed light on the players and strategies in a vicious turf fight between rival traffickers vying for control of the lucrative smuggling corridor.
The testimony has also skimmed the murkiness of drug enforcement on both sides of the border. At least one witness and even the main defendant have been outed as sources for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who were later arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration for running drugs.
The testimony comes in the trial of two accused drug smugglers, Fernando Ontiveros-Arámbula, whom an ICE agent today said was an informant for the agency, and Manuel Chávez-Betancourt, who refused to cooperate with the government out of fear for his family's safety, according to court records. (For safety concerns, the federal judge, David Briones, ordered that jurors have lunch brought in to them each day.) Witnesses have testified that Ontiveros-Aråmbula worked directly under Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, who leads the Sinaloa drug syndicate, the El Paso Times reports.
The trial has a motley array of characters, from a rooster breeder who stored caches of marijuana in his New Mexico barn to a female trafficker who allegedly survived being shot 15 times to a former Juarez police captain who said all law enforcement in the city and elsewhere in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are on the take, including himself. Among them are several witnesses who have also been indicted or convicted of drug smuggling charges in El Paso and elsewhere and were flipped by the U.S. government to testify against the smugglers.
Among the more intriguing witnesses so far is the former Juarez police captain. Jesus Fierro-Mendez was a 10-year police veteran who ran a counter-narcotics unit, the EPT reports. He left the police department in April 2007 under suspicious circumstances, sources say. Federal agents arrested him at his El Paso home in Oct. 2008. He was sentenced in January to 27 years in prison by a federal judge in Indianapolis.
A quick aside: this former police captain got 324 months for smuggling cocaine into the United States. Most U.S. law enforcement busted for corruption typically get far less prison time. A Pennsylvania Congressman, however, introduced last month a bill that includes stiffer penalties for agents who accept bribes. By comparison, Osiel Cardenas, the notorious former head of the Gulf Cartel, was recently sentenced to 25 years after pleading guilty to drug dealing, money laundering and the attempted murder and assault of federal agents, according to news reports.
The counter-narcotics unit, known as Puma, consisted of young officers fresh out of the police academy who were supposed to be incorruptible, sources say. Little did the rookie cops apparently know that their boss was himself involved in the drug trade.
But Fierro-Mendez's testimony comes with a twist — he was also an ICE informant who, he said, was authorized by the infamous "El Chapo" of the Sinaloa gang to give U.S. law enforcement information about the rival Juarez cartel.
ICE agents in El Paso have walked down this path before, and not just with today's news that the defendant was passing information to the U.S. at the same time he was trying to pass loads of drugs. A law enforcement source said it is not uncommon for traffickers to offer information about competitors.
Another ICE informant was implicated in at least a dozen murders in Juarez around 2003. That informant, Guillermo Ramirez-Peyro, known as Lalo, awaits his fate in an immigration detention center in New York.
Last May, a high-ranking member of the Juarez cartel, who was also an ICE informant, was gunned down outside of his El Paso home. Among the hitmen was another member of the Juarez cartel who was also, allegedly, an ICE informant.
After federal prosecutors rested their case today, defense attorney began their questioning. Explosions expected to follow.
Almost a half-million people have sought refuge from the drug violence racking the Mexican border metropolis of Juarez, according to a newspaper estimate.
The El Paso Times reported this week that the city of Juarez's planning department have found that 110,000 houses have been abandoned from 2005 to the beginning of 2009.
The paper extrapolates that "based on average family size, about 420,000 people, or 30 percent of the city's residents, have moved out of Juárez, either to other parts of Mexico or to the United States."
Although numbers may be squishy, the paper said local police, real estate agents and demographers "detect an increase in refugees from Mexico living in El Paso."
Some of the "refugees" could be tied to the economy as about 75,000 people have lost their jobs since Dec. 2007, the paper reports. The maquiladora industry, which manufactures or assembles products for international distribution, shed most of those positions.
But another extraordinary statistic the paper reports is that more than 10,000 businesses — about 40 percent of the city's total — have closed out of fear of extortion and assault, according to the Mexican chamber of commerce.
CIR, reporting for The Nation, wrote last year that "Officials on both sides of the border acknowledge these new immigrants but decline to make estimates of how many have fled."
What's interesting about the El Paso Times story is the effort to go beyond the local body count — more than 4,600 killed since 2008 — to quantify the economic and social damage that the violence has had in Juarez.
While the U.S. has pledged $1.4 billion in aid to Mexico and Central American countries to combat the drug trade, there has been little public discussion between the U.S. and Mexico about the social fallout from the related violence, and possible refugees from the drug war.
Elsewhere in Texas, the former head of the infamous Gulf cartel was sentenced behind closed doors in Houston to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $50 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Here is the press release from the U.S. attorney's office.
Mexico’s brutal drug war has rattled that country’s sense of security, deepened its economic crisis and shifted attention from other pressing concerns. Leading journalists and scholars explore the roots of the violence, what its lasting impact may be, and how the drug war might be resolved. They examine ways that the narco-violence is affecting – and affected by – the United States. And they discuss how the U.S. press is covering the issue and what stories about Mexico we might be missing.
A panel of journalists who have covered Mexico discuss their work and their observations. They will be joined by the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies to go behind the headlines and talk about the political and economic forces shaping Mexico today.
The event is jointly sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Graduate School of Journalism, both at UC Berkeley.
Reporting on Mexico: Drugs, Violence and the Prospects for a Nation’s Future
Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting
Steve Fainaru, Washington Post
Susan Ferriss, Sacramento Bee
Prof. Harley Shaiken, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies
Moderated by Tyche Hendricks, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
North Gate Hall Library
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
5:30 p.m.
National Public Radio, in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting, will broadcast tonight the first in a three-part series on foreigners who work as confidential informants.
CIR reporter Andrew Becker along with Michael Montgomery, a producer with CIR’s California Watch project, produced the third story in the series about an informant who went public with his case last summer after immigration officials tried to deport him. The story will air Saturday, Feb. 13 on NPR’S Weekend Edition program.
The Los Angeles Times will run a separate story on the treatment of such informants.
CIR’s 10-month investigation on the treatment of informants who do not have legal immigrant status in the United States found several instances of informants who say they have been wronged by drug agents and immigration officials.
>> Visit CIR's complete reporting project on immigration courts in the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last fall held an "Industry Day" on detention reform as a way to get feedback from current and potential contractors and other interested parties. The event was closed to the news media.
ICE provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting a list of the companies represented, but would not disclose who the attendees were. The event was held at the Julie Myers Conference room at ICE headquarters.
The companies in attendance range from builders to current jailers to the Royal Bank of Canada. Several already have detention-related contracts or are staffed with former ICE or the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials.
Here's the list of the companies, as provided by ICE (with light editing):
1. K4 Solutions, Inc. (past DHS contractors)
2. McConnell International, LLC (an executive was formerly with INS.)
3. The Dozoretz Group, LLC (Nina Dozoretz, formerly with the Division of Immigration Health Service; recently returned to the government to work with ICE on detainee health care.)
4. PSA-Dewberry, Inc. (architects)
5. Proteus On Demand Facilities (builders)
6. Kelly, Anderson & Associates (The company has several former high-ranking Homeland Security officials on its staff, including a former chief of the Border Patrol.)
7. Arc Aspicio, LLC
8. Stanley Associates
9. Pike County Corrections Facility (currently holds detainees)
10. Pike County Commissioners Office
11. Northrop Grumman Corporation
12. Worchester County Jail (currently holds detainees)
13. LCS Corrections (ICE contractor)
14. CACI, Inc. (ICE contractor)
15. Emerald Companies (ICE contractor)
16. Nortel Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
17. Youth Services International
18. Capgemini Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
19. USIS (DHS contractor, background investigations)
20. MGT of America (ICE contractor)
21. The CMC Group (builders)
22. Ernst & Young
23. KeyPoint Government Solutions (Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on board of directors, DHS contractors)
24. The Forest Group, Inc.
25. Community Education Centers, Inc.
26. CCA (ICE contractor)
27. Unique Comp Inc. (CBP contractor)
28. Office of Federal Detention Trustee
29. Management & Training Corporation (ICE contractor)
30. Strategic Business Alliance
31. Health Insurance LLC
32. JJ DeLuca Company, Inc. (construction)
33. NetStar 1 (ICE/DHS contractor, data management)
34. GEO Group (ICE contractor)
35. Global Integrated Security
36. iSECUREtrac
37. Oldcastle Precast Modular & Security (builder)
38. Sundt Construction
39. KIMBALL furniture
40. Royal Bank of Canada
41. Frederick County Adult Detention (ICE contractor)
42. Argyle Corrections Group
43. ManTech (DHS contractor)
44. GEO Transportation (ICE contractor)
45. Volunteers of America
46. Price Waterhouse Coopers (DHS contractor)
47. Correctional Eye Care Services
48. STG International (DIHS contractor)
49. Dun & Bradstreet Gov. Solutions
50. Cornell Companies (ICE contractor)
51. Loredo Lomas Properties (real estate)
52. IBM
53. RTR Technologies engineering
54. Immigration Centers of America (ICE contractor)
55. Nabholtz Construction Corporation
56. Accenture (DHS contractor)
While immigration reform advocates wait for Congress to fix the nation's broken immigration system, the Department of Homeland Security says it’s committed to its pledge to overhaul immigration detention.
But the department needs help. And officials are looking for ideas. The agencies that run immigration detention and detainee health care are turning, in some cases, to the same people, consultants and companies that have been advising or working with those agencies for years.
For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the department’s investigative arm and jailers to some 30,000 immigrant detainees on any given day, in the fall hosted an “Industry Day” event, where agency officials outlined to an audience of mostly government contractors their plans and goals to re-make detention.
ICE officials told attendees that reform is badly needed, and acknowledged shortcomings, some of which have been outlined in a report issued by DHS in early October.
The thrust of the three-hour gathering — which attracted representatives from nearly 60 companies, consultants and detention watchers but was closed to news media — was “to begin a dialogue with current or prospective detention service providers for the purpose of sharing the basic premises of our reform efforts, secure feedback and begin to expand our market research,” according to the event posting on the government contracting Web site FedBizOpps.gov.
Attendees included various former immigration officials now in the private sector, defense contractors, the Royal Bank of Canada, IBM and a host of efficiency experts, builders and other consultants, including a company that has former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on its board of directors.
"This is a pivotal moment right now in terms of immigration, in terms of detention reform," said attendee Nina Dozoretz who until recently ran a health-care related consulting firm. "I’m optimistic – there's a big commitment from ICE to move this forward."
Dozoretz retired in August 2004 as the associate director of the Division of Immigration Health Services after spending 20 years as a public health service official.
In November — shortly after the event and days after she spoke to CIR — Dozoretz returned to ICE to oversee the health-care overhaul for the Office of Detention and Removal Operations. She said that the reform efforts were what brought her back to ICE.
Dozoretz, who also worked as vice president for the detention monitor and ICE contractor Nakamoto Group, recently appeared in a New York Times article on the issue of detainee deaths.
Homeland Security Department officials have outlined the intended overhaul, including more oversight, centralizing contracts and a custody classification system. The pledged reforms are part of a shift from a broad-based, one-size-fits-all, lock-up system toward a more civil approach.
Mike Magee, a Homeland Security consultant who formerly ran ICE’s criminal alien program for state and local prisons and jails, said civil detention is a good idea, but will be difficult to implement.
The goal is to spend wiser and use alternatives to detention, such as ankle-bracelet monitors when detention isn’t appropriate or necessary.
On Monday, John Morton, the assistant secretary for ICE, spoke about the ongoing reform effort, including a forthcoming detainee locator system, at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
But the big money – and big challenges – remain in detaining immigrants, attendees say. ICE has signed several new contracts to build or expand immigration detention facilities in the past year. The agency’s push to track down more immigrants with criminal charges or convictions may also increase the need for detention bed space. Known as Secure Communities, the ICE program helps local law enforcement agencies screen people in custody for their immigration status.
In a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, GEO Group Inc., one of the government’s biggest contractors for immigration detention, pointed toward anticipated growth of federal detention, particularly immigrants. That means more money. From GEO's third-quarter report:
"We believe ICE will continue to emphasize the detention and removal of criminal aliens throughout the country. ICE has been allocated approximately $1.4 billion for this purpose. We believe that this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years."
For years, ICE has said that deporting criminal aliens has been its top priority, but in practice immigration agents New York Times grabbed whomever they could. This new Secure Communities program claims to re-focus its priority.
ICE has plans to roll out the program across the country by 2013, making its database available to every law enforcement agency nationwide. In the first year of its existence, ICE identified more than 111,000 criminal immigrants in 11 states.
But there’s no more money in this year’s budget for major reform, attendees were told. Senior agency officials, among them Phyllis Coven, the director of the Office of Detention Planning and Policy, and David Venturella, the director of Detention and Removal Operations, intimated that ICE will request proposals to build new detention facilities.
Plans were announced for a 2,200-bed “low-custody” detention facility in Los Angeles, but the date to submit proposals has been delayed more than a month.
“I believe these people are all very sincere and have good intentions,” said Peter Michel, CEO of iSECUREtrac, a Nebraska-based company that provides ankle-monitoring technology. “It sounds like they have a pretty big mountain to climb.”
Who is Tracey Bardorf?
John Morton, the assistant secretary for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, last summer brought on the relatively young former federal prosecutor to be his special adviser for Mexico and border matters.
Before joining ICE, Bardorf oversaw the Justice Department’s Mérida Initiative projects and implementation of the Global Trafficking in Persons program, according to her ICE Web site bio.
Now 10 years out of law school — she graduated from Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in 2000 — including a few years of corporate litigation before she joined the government, she now, presumably, has the country's top immigration and customs enforcement official’s ear. Or not.
She spent about four years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Arizona, where she handled firearms, immigration, trafficking in persons and violent crime prosecutions, according to her bio. A search of a federal courts database shows she was involved in about 400 cases before she was detailed to Mexico as the Department of Justice resident legal adviser in Mexico City.
Among her notable cases were convictions of child sex traffickers in 2008, a 2007 guilty plea from a Mexican national on aggravated identity theft and illegally re-entering the country after deportation and separate 2006 convictions of coyotes whose misguided border crossings resulted in the deaths of illegal immigrants.
In recent months, Bardorf, 35, has popped up on an American Bar Association panel in Washington D.C. in November, speaking about narco-violence along the border and emerging national security law issues, and then again late last year for a meeting between Mexican and U.S. officials in Mexico City.
Other than that, there isn't a lot of reliable information about her. So, who is Tracey Bardorf?
Bardorf is a Republican and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. She sat on — and eventually was voted chairwoman of — Arizona’s Clean Elections panel, which monitors the state’s system for public financing of candidates, according to the commission's 2005 annual report. (She resigned in 2006 after serving two years of a five-year term when the Justice Department raised a conflict of interest objection, according to a news report.)
She is a graduate of St. Anselm College, a Catholic liberal arts college in New Hampshire, and she attended Phillips Exeter Academy. She is fluent in Spanish, German and French, and is proficient in Italian, according to the annual report.
Other than that, based on an unscientific, informal, quick survey of a handful of people, not much else is known about her. Some people had heard of her. Others hadn’t.
As far as her efforts with the $1.4 billion anti-narcotics aid package dubbed the Mérida Initiative, which has drawn criticism for being Mexico’s version of Plan Colombia and because of alleged human rights abuses by the Mexican military, there isn’t much public information.
(For more information on Mérida, see the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute).
A Government Accountability Office report released in December found that the release of funds for the Mérida Initiative was dragging, but that “a broad range of training, exchange, and technical assistance programs have been completed or initiated with the aim of strengthening the capacity of law enforcement and justice sector institutions.”
How much of that relates to the Justice Department or even Bardorf's involvement? Good question.
A Congressional Research Service report last year states that “many predict that it is likely to take much longer than three years for Mérida to help partner governments make real headway in achieving that goal" but U.S. officials "maintain that some of the most important results of Mérida thus far may be impossible to quantify, such as the increase in communication and cooperation that has developed as a result of the Initiative among U.S., Mexican, and Central American law enforcement and security officials."
Maybe that's where Bardorf comes in. But how she became one of Morton's top advisers is a question that remains unanswered. Any ideas? abecker (at) cironline (dot) org
A Justice Department investigation of an immigration judge's misconduct in Florida gives a Bahamian asylum seeker another day in court.
The National Law Journal reports that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility found that Bruce Solow, an immigration judge in Miami, "engaged in professional misconduct when he acted in reckless disregard of his obligation to be fair and impartial."
In a 2005 asylum hearing Solow mocked Roscoe Campbell, who said he fled his native Bahamas for fear for his life after reporting to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration corrupt officials engaging in drug-trafficking, according to the article. Solow ordered Campbell and his family deported.
The federal appellate courts have excoriated some immigration judges for their conduct, including Anna Ho, a Los Angeles-based immigration judge.
The fact that the Justice Department's internal affairs office took a look at the judge's behavior is extraordinary, Nadine Wettstein of the American Immigration Legal Council, told the legal newspaper.
Still, there isn't a lot known about the larger issue of judicial misconduct and how the court leadership - and, by extension, the Justice Department - handles complaints. The NLJ writes:
The lack of transparency irritates attorneys and judges alike. The American Immigration Council's Wettstein and other immigration lawyers said complaints against immigration judges to the Executive Office seem to go into a "black hole," and, they added, getting notice of findings made by OPR also seems rare.
Immigration attorneys have also been reluctant, in some cases, to file complaints against certain judges because they may have to argue before the judge again.
As the NLJ article points out, the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, has its own procedure for taking complaints against immigration judges and private attorneys.
The agency would not release information on the number of complaints received nor would it make public its disciplinary actions, citing privacy concerns, according to the story.
The story also makes the point that the Justice Department's process for investigating complaints against immigration judges is "neither swift nor transparent and because of that, it can be unfair -- to aliens, attorneys and immigration judges."
We're interested in learning more about the immigration courts. If you have ideas to share, please contact abecker (at) cironline (dot) org.
The government will generally no longer detain asylum seekers who arrive at U.S. border crossings, airports and other entry points who have a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country as long as they meet certain requirements, immigration officials announced today.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security Department's investigative arm and the agency responsible for immigration detention, will put the policy into place starting Jan. 4, according to an ICE press release.
ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton said in a statement that the new policy, which changes the agency's stance on locking up people who ask for protection when they arrive at border crossings, is part of ongoing efforts to reform immigration detention.
“These new parole procedures for asylum seekers will help ICE focus both on protecting against major threats to public safety and implementing common-sense detention policies,” he said.
The new guidelines give the government authority to allow asylum seekers who have not been formally allowed into the country to remain out of immigration jail if they meet requirements determined by an asylum officer or an immigration judge. Normally foreign nationals who seek entrance into the United States but are without a visa or other valid travel documents are not permitted into the country.
CIR previously reported with the Los Angeles Times on the detention of Mexican asylum seekers, including police officers, who fled the country because they were afraid for their lives.
Arriving asylum seekers must establish their identity and show that they are not a danger to the country or a flight risk, and have a "credible" or valid fear of persecution or torture, as determined by an asylum officer or an immigration jduge. Such refugees must show that they are also eligible for asylum to be considered for release. The parole out of detention doesn't automatically mean that the asylum seeker will be granted protection.
The new policy also instructs ICE agents to report monthly on parole rates and decision-making in order to ensure that paroled asylum seekers are complying with requirements.
Foreign nationals who are already legally in the country when they ask for asylum are typically not subject to detention.