more sniveling from illegal alien supporters...I applaud ICE officials ridding my country of illegal alien parasites...while illegals weep and whine about how 'unfair' it is that law enforcement officials somehow 'trick them' into opening their front doors (doors they shouldn't even be behind)....or complain because a flashlight was pointed towards their sniveling illegal face....while the leeches that support illegal aliens (lawyers, for example) sputter their disagreement, but amazingly they cannot quote a specific section of our laws....instead they just hurl around the term 'constitutional rights' -- but ICE officials, who, as far as I can tell, possess warrants of some kind, are carrying out their responsibilities and duties according to our laws...the problem, naturally, is that illegal aliens (a) don't respect laws and (b) never obey laws and (c) get upset when they are forced to comply with laws....well too FN bad....get on the bus or plane and leave...
Immigration officials say raids on illegals are within the law
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE STAFF WRITER
FILE PHOTO U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting an illegal immigrant. Lawyers say agents are conducting raids that violate the Constitution.
The federal government is increasingly deceiving unsuspecting illegal immigrants into granting entry to their homes, a growing chorus of lawyers and civil rights groups say.
They charge that in an overzealous effort to deport illegal immigrants, federal immigration agents forgo required search warrants, instead using ruses and intimidation to gain consent to enter and search private dwellings. In interviews with The Record and in a growing number of lawsuits, immigrants and critics of the raids say that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violating the U.S. Constitution.
"They're armed agents showing up at 5 a.m., banging on doors, kicking them in, going into people's bedrooms, ripping covers off people in their beds, asking them questions when they're half asleep, and seizing them and taking them away," said Patrick Gennardo of Englewood, one of several area attorneys who have filed suits recently asking that such ICE practices be found unconstitutional. "These aren't fine lines between consent and storming in; these are scary, major violations of the Constitution."
But Scott Weber, field director for ICE's office in Newark, takes exception to those claims.
"We all operate under the same Constitution," Weber said. "My officers are not involved in sweeps or random searches. We're looking for specific individuals that we have specific information for and active and valid warrants for their removal [from the U.S.] Our officers have extensive training in which they're taught constitutional law, statutory law and immigration law."
Confronted by agents
REALTED STORY --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Raid shakes ex-Yugoslavian family
BY THE NUMBERS --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arrests made in New Jersey as part of the National Fugitive Operations Program, which was established in March 2003.
2007: 2,079
2006: 1,094
2005: 657
2004: 557
2003: 76
Note: The statistics are for fiscal years, which run from October to September. Because the program was begun in March 2003, the figure for that year does not cover a full fiscal year.
In a scenario commonly described in interviews and court affidavits, immigrants said they have awakened to loud, persistent knocks on their doors, the shout of "Police," flashlights shining in their faces and guns dangling from holsters.
In those instances, immigrants opened their doors, expecting local police and fearing news about a tragedy, or a criminal loose in the neighborhood.
Instead, they found themselves confronted by immigration agents, often inquiring about someone whose photo or name they did not recognize. Then, the agents interrogated them, they said, handcuffing, detaining and preparing for deportation those who could not show lawful U.S. residence.
"I don't see it as storming a home," Weber said. "We see it as trying to locate someone."
After 9/11, the federal government focused on finding immigrants with outstanding deportation orders. ICE teams in New Jersey arrested more than 2,000 such illegals in 2007, compared with 1,094 in 2006. Nationally, the arrests also doubled -- 30,408 in 2007, up from 15,462 in 2006. Some 500,000 illegal immigrants are estimated to be living in New Jersey; with at least 12 million in the United States.
ICE officials say they are proud of the arrests -- the result of the so-called Fugitive Operations Program. Many ICE districts, including New Jersey, have topped their annual goal of 1,000 arrests. Weber said ICE is not going after innocent victims, but either "fugitive absconders" -- people who have ignored deportation orders -- or other illegal immigrants whom ICE agents encounter during a raid.
But a slew of lawsuits in New Jersey and nationwide accuse ICE of pursuing those arrest goals by trampling over the U.S. Constitution – particularly the Fourth Amendment, which grants protection from unlawful search and seizure, and the Fifth Amendment, which provides safeguards against self-incrimination. Two weeks ago, the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University requested files from 10 New Jersey towns -- including Englewood and Morristown -- under the state's Open Public Records Act seeking information about ICE raids in those locations. Attorneys with the center say they expect to seek records from more towns where ICE raids were conducted.
Meanwhile, more and more immigrants across New Jersey are finding ICE at their door.
Valjbona Hot, a native of the former Yugoslavia who has been living in Fair Lawn for 17 years, has had an electronic monitoring device on her ankle since her home was raided in September. Her husband, Salih, spent about three months in an immigration detention center in Elizabeth.
"We are not criminals," said Salih, the father of three U.S.-born sons who was released after his lawyer requested a stay of deportation pending a motion to reopen the case. "We have not been hiding from them. We have been here, at the same address, the whole time."
'Luis Borges' ruse?
Salih Hot said immigration officers came to his house, asking about a man he didn't know. But Hot said he noticed that the agents carried a file with his photo and information in it. They asked the Hots for ID and proof that they were legal residents. Then they arrested them when they could not produce it.
Brenda Cumsille of Cliffside Park said more than a dozen ICE agents entered her home in April, asking about "Luis Borges." They ended up arresting her husband, who had an outstanding deportation order, and deporting him in May. Cumsille said an unscrupulous "immigration consultant" they hired never told her husband that he faced deportation.
Cumsille believes ICE agents, who she initially thought were local police, used "Luis Borges" as a ruse to gain permission to enter. "It was a lie," said Cumsille, who stayed behind with two U.S.-born daughters. "They didn't come looking for Luis Borges. They were looking for my husband."
In Newark that same month, Susana Vasquez awakened at 4:30 a.m. to find ICE agents in her bedroom. She said they had gained entry into the multifamily home by telling her landlord they were looking for a certain man.
"We didn't know who this was," she said. "It was no one we'd ever seen."
The agents arrested Vasquez and others who couldn't prove legal status. Vasquez said that agents, who she stressed were polite to her, conducted a raid on another site while she and other detainees waited in ICE vehicles.
"The other people they picked up and I talked among ourselves about our arrest, and how ICE had come into our apartments showing photos of people we'd never seen," Vasquez said. "I wasn't worried because I thought they were looking for the man in the photo. I answered their questions because they didn't indicate that they were investigating me and could arrest me."
ICE officials often note that unlike guidelines governing criminal arrests, those for immigration enforcement do not require a judicial warrant to enter a private residence, only a person's consent. They dismiss the assertion that ICE agents use deception in identifying themselves simply as "police" instead of immigration agents. They say they are police -- federal police.
Weber said agents do not approach homes asking about people they know do not live there. He said they do exhaustive preparatory work to be as sure as possible that a fugitive absconder lives at a particular address.
About the many accounts of inquiries about unknown targets, Weber said: "People we're looking for in many case provided the wrong addresses or bogus address. [ICE agents] are following up on the information that the person provided."
But Vasquez's attorney, Rex Chen of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Newark, says ICE's handling of his client was "a violation of her constitutional rights." Chen said agents misled her into thinking she was not a target, and she answered questions and incriminated herself under that assumption.
Gennardo's class-action suit, filed with the Puerto Rican Legal and Defense and Education Fund in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, says: "When the unsuspecting residents ... open the door to inquire about what is going on, the agents then bully or force their way into homes without first obtaining the occupants' consent to entry.
"The unstated goal of these raids is to gain access to constitutionally protected areas in the hope of seizing as many undocumented persons as possible."
'We have an invasion'
ICE has plenty of supporters. Many say tougher enforcement is critical, especially because Congress has failed to pass immigration reform bills that have sought to control U.S. borders while also providing some undocumented immigrants a path to legalization. Ron Bass, founder of United Patriots of America, based in Linden, assails the lawsuits as preposterous and hypocritical.
"If they want to talk about the Constitution, fine," he said. "They should be reminded that the Constitution also says that the president must protect us against invasions. With the millions of people coming into this country illegally, we have an invasion, there are felons and this is a big problem for homeland security."
Bass said he would not condone human rights abuses against illegal immigrants, but "why should people who broke into the United States illegally be protected by my Constitution?"
Critics of ICE raids say everyone should be alarmed when constitutional rights are at issue in the treatment of any group.
"Immigration officials have every right to place people in deportation proceedings," said Bassina Farbenblum, an attorney with Seton Hall University's Center for Social Justice. "And if they're not entitled to stay in the United States, they should remove them. But there have to be constitutional limitations on the way in which immigration officials locate and arrest them."
"It's very dangerous to go down a path where we say the Constitution doesn't matter for a cer- tain group of people," Farben-blum said. "This isn't a cowboy state."
E-mail: llorente@northjersey.com. Staff Writer Elizabeth Llorente is a 2007 Peter Jennings Fellow. The Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution was inaugurated in 2007 and is hosted by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and funded by the Annenberg Foundation and the Knight Foundation. In 2007, 30 journalists were selected to attend a workshop on the U.S. Constitution -- a longtime fascination of the late ABC News anchor, who was born in Canada -- and to produce work examining constitutional issues.
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