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BOSTON — The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, touted the success of a month-long immigration enforcement operation during a press conference Monday morning that resulted in the detention of nearly 1,500 immigrants across Massachusetts.
Also present at the John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse Monday morning were U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley and Patricia Hyde, the acting field office director in Boston for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.
“Make no mistake: Every person that we arrested was breaking our immigration laws, but most of these individuals had significant criminality,” said Hyde. “They are criminal offenders who victimized innocent people and traumatized entire communities — murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational criminal gangs.”
Hyde went on to say the operation, dubbed “Operation Patriot,” has protected residents of Massachusetts.
“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a safer place today,” said Hyde, who added that 1,461 people were detained over the course of the month, including 790 with “significant criminality” — meaning they faced criminal charges, notwithstanding the outcomes of cases. That leaves 691 with no significant criminal records.
“ICE is not going away,” she added. “We are coming for you.”
Officials said many faced criminal charges related to drugs, domestic violence, impaired driving, child sex abuse, sex trafficking, and more.
“It’s long past time for ICE to remove these dangerous criminals from our communities,” Lyons, ICE’s acting director, said during the conference. “While these operations were going on, more criminal aliens were being released into the community.”
He added that federal officials were outraged at the hostility ICE agents have faced and that threats to their lives and their families’ lives is why they are often masked during operations.
“People are out there taking photos of the names and faces and posting them online with death threats,” Lyons said, before switching to a sarcastic tone. “I’m sorry if people are offended that they’re wearing masks.”
Lyons also insisted that agents had respected the civil and due process rights of all those detained.
“The whole due process thing,” a frustrated Lyons said in response to a question from the gathered press. “ICE doesn’t just scoop people up off the street and remove them.”
New Bedford reacts to Operation Patriot
Local advocates said the detentions they have seen over the past few months contradict such statements.
“That is contrary to what the community in New Bedford has experienced,” said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Corporation of Southeastern Massachusetts, in a text message.
“They haven’t been respecting civil rights,” Adrian Ventura, executive director of the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, told The Light in Spanish. “The most egregious example of that is [the case of] Juan Francisco Méndez.”
Méndez was detained in a viral arrest in April when federal agents were filmed using an axe to break his car window despite his invocation of his right to remain silent and calling his lawyer, Ondine Gálvez Sniffen, to come to the scene.
Authorities held Méndez in custody for over a month under multiple alien registration numbers and faced no charges until after an immigration judge in Chelmsford Immigration Court declared a failure to prosecute on May 8. After Méndez was issued charging documents for illegal entry, another immigration judge ordered his release on bail on May 15.
Jonathan Darling, public information officer for the city of New Bedford, said in a Monday email that the city’s position about ICE operations has not changed.
“Our Police Department focuses on its core mission of ensuring public safety in New Bedford,” Darling wrote. “The NBPD does not withhold information from other law enforcement agencies.
“With respect to the federal government’s approach to the enforcement of immigration law,” he continued, “the Mayor has made clear that the focus should be on known criminals or others who pose public safety risks.”
The Light’s records show that 10 of the 28 confirmed New Bedford immigrants detained since President Trump’s inauguration were arrested in May. Based on reviews of Massachusetts court records, only one of the identified May detainees, Juan Ramón Alegría Rodas, had any criminal charges in the Commonwealth. Those stemmed from a criminal complaint filed in Framingham District Court by his wife, Patricia, in 2007. That charge was dismissed after both parties failed to appear for a court date.
Sanctuary and detainees without criminal histories debated
“It is a stretch to conjure up the image of a hardened criminal from the ordinary immigrant workers who are working at a car wash or painting houses,” said Williams of the CEDC. “We would really have to do an analysis on this and how ‘significant criminality’ is defined: Driving without a license? A second entry at the border of an individual without any criminal record?”
Hyde acknowledged that many of the detained faced no criminal charges, but she said that state and local “sanctuary” jurisdiction policies mean that ICE officers need to go into communities and detain people with criminal charges — and that others are taken in the process. She argued that the detention Saturday of Marcelo Gomes, an 18-year-old undocumented Brazilian immigrant and senior at Milford High School, was an example of the negative impacts of sanctuary policies.
“He was not the target of the investigation,” Hyde said of Gomes, adding that agents were after his father. “But he’s 18 and in the country illegally.”
“Sanctuary policies put us in a position where we have to go out into communities and conduct these arrests,” she said. “We’ve been completely transparent” that those found to be in the U.S. without proper documentation beyond the targets would also be swept up.
Governor Maura Healey called Gomes’ arrest outrageous in a press release Sunday.
“I’m disturbed and outraged by reports that a Milford High School student was arrested by ICE on his way to volleyball practice yesterday,” she said. “Yet again, local officials and law enforcement have been left in the dark with no heads up and no answers to their questions.”
“I’m demanding that ICE provide immediate information about why he was arrested, where he is and how his due process is being protected,” she continued. “The Trump Administration continues to create fear in our communities, and it’s making us all less safe.”
Neither New Bedford nor Massachusetts has a “sanctuary law” in place barring local and state officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. However, the 2017 Lunn decision by Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. Many advocates and law enforcement officials have argued such policies improve public safety by encouraging immigrant communities to interact with police and local officials.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration recently included Massachusetts as a sanctuary jurisdiction in a list published on the Department of Homeland Security website.
“It’s a matter of semantics,” said Hyde. “But what do you call it when state and local operations don’t cooperate?”
By June 1, the list was removed from the site due to widespread criticism, according to an Associated Press report.
Aftermath of operation
U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said 50 of those detained over the course of the May operation were charged in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts with illegal re-entry. At least two of those men, Guatemalans Mário López Sajvin and José DeLeón Ventura, were New Bedford residents. Both pleaded guilty to the charge.
“My office will continue to prosecute those who are in the country unlawfully,” she said. “This is the land of opportunity, not the land for opportunists.”
The operation included agents from all over the country and several different federal agencies, including: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Customs and Border Protection; Diplomatic Security Service; Drug Enforcement Agency; U.S. Coast Guard; Homeland Security Investigations; ICE; Internal Revenue Service the FBI; Federal Prison Service, and U.S. Marshals.
Though Operation Patriot may be over, local activists say the effects of the operation remain, with broken families and people trying to fix finances and move forward with their lives.
“This was a disaster for our community,” Ventura said. “Most of the community has been traumatized by the violence inflicted upon us.”
Ventura said that for those who have already been deported — such as Rodas, Miguel Ordoñez Socop and José Antonio Garcia Garcia — what awaits them in their homeland is greater danger.
“They came here to escape violence in Central America,” he said. “All that awaits them there is death.”
Kevin G. Andrade can be reached at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
Are we supposed to feel bad for these illegal immigrants who violated US Immigration laws? I don’t and neither should you, they’re criminals who refused to follow a process in place for people around the world who want to come to the U.S., what these illegal immigrants have done is say “screw the process” I’ll just break the law and live in America, and now they’re caught, detained, and deported, and they can suffer those circumstances just as they should with ZERO opportunity to come here legally on the future.