ICE Agents in North Carolina Arrest Hundreds of Illegal Aliens

The Associated Press
By The Associated Press
February 9, 2019US News
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ICE Agents in North Carolina Arrest Hundreds of Illegal Aliens
Salvadoran migrants heading in a caravan to the US rest during a stop on their journey, in Ciudad Tecun Uman, Guatemala, on the border with Mexico, on November 1, 2018. (Photo by MARVIN RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images)

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Hundreds of illegal aliens in the United States were arrested this week in North Carolina after some local law agencies stopped cooperating with immigration enforcement, a federal official said on Feb. 8.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement regional director Sean Gallagher said the arrests resulted from what he termed “the dangerous policies of not cooperating with ICE,” The Charlotte Observer reported.

“This is politics over public safety at its worst,” Gallagher said at a news conference. It’s a change, he said, that gave the agency “no choice” but to conduct targeted enforcement operations like the one this week.

“Some of the dangerous policies that some of our county sheriffs have put into place … really forces my officers to go out onto the street to conduct more enforcement operations,” Gallagher said at a news conference. “We don’t want to be out doing this at-large enforcement. It’s much more dangerous for my staff, the general public and those being arrested.”

Gallagher rattled off a list of the charges people who have been released from the county jails in recent weeks instead of being turned over to ICE: drug trafficking, sex offenses, assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering, armed robbery and assault on an officer.

ICE officers have detained 200 people in North Carolina this week. Another 25 were detained at an arms manufacturer in Sanford. Gallagher said more such arrests are likely when ICE is restricted from accessing county jails.

“If they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, my officers will take an enforcement action,” he said.

The enforcement actions have become necessary, Gallagher said, as sheriffs in Wake, Durham, Orange, and Mecklenburg counties have elected not to cooperate with federal immigration efforts.

Since December, new sheriffs in Mecklenburg and Wake counties have reversed a policy that notifies ICE about the legal status of inmates in county jails. The Durham County Sheriff’s Office also ended the practice of honoring ICE detainers.

Charlotte City Council member Braxton Winston said he was threatened with arrest for trying to enter the building without media credentials during the news conference at the Department of Homeland Security office in Charlotte.

In other North Carolina enforcement actions this week, 50 people had already been ordered deported by immigration judges and were considered fugitives, another 50 have already been convicted and 40 more have pending criminal charges, Gallagher said. Sixty other people were detained even though they weren’t targeted in the raids, he said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officers arrest an undocumented Mexican immigrant during a raid in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City on April 11, 2018. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Despite 30 percent of those arrested not being targets, Gallagher denied that ICE is conducting indiscriminate sweeps in immigrant communities. In the 2017-18 fiscal year, he noted, 91 percent of the people arrested by ICE in the Carolinas and Georgia had been convicted or faced criminal charges.

Speaking to reporters and activists outside the office, Winston said he was told by ICE official Robert Alfieri that the arrests represent a “new normal” because Mecklenburg County’s new sheriff, Garry McFadden, is not cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

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