Gustavo Solis

The Desert Sun

Immigration Customs and Enforcement officers arrested Victor Rodriguez in Cathedral City as he drove to pick up one of his kids from baseball practice in March.

Rodriguez's wife and three other children saw him in handcuffs, unable to process exactly what they saw.

"When I got home I couldn't stop crying," said his oldest son.

Rodriguez, a church-going construction worker who coaches youth soccer and has been living in the country illegally since the 90s, is one of thousands of immigrants who are funneled from the criminal justice system to immigration detention centers. In his case, a 2001 arrest prompted immigration officials to target him again years later, according to an ICE spokesperson.

READ PART TWO OF THE SERIES: ICE targets jails to find undocumented immigrants, even if they haven't been convicted of anything

Members of Rodriguez's church, who raised more than $1,000 to help bail him out of detention, were confused by the arrest. They thought President Donald Trump was only going after the bad guys.

“I think many people are misled to believe that we are just going after dangerous criminals,” said Father Howard Lincoln of Sacred Heart Church in Palm Desert.

The definition of a criminal alien varies depending on who you ask. The law allows federal authorities to arrest anyone who is in the country illegally, independent of their criminal history. Critics argue that being in the country illegally is a civil penalty not a criminal one, and those who break civil laws shouldn't be treated like murderers or rapists.

Since there are 11 million undocumented people living in the country and there are limited resources, the federal government has historically prioritized enforcement for undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records.

But data shows that people without convictions or with non-violent convictions are often targeted.

WHO IS A TARGET

During the Obama Administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement routinely targeted immigrants who had not been convicted of any crime.

Despite President Barack Obama’s stated policy of prioritizing enforcement on people convicted of violent offenses, data shows that immigrants with minor rap sheets were often the subject of investigations through ICE’s detainer program, in which federal investigators ask local jails to hold inmates in order to question and arrest them.

In fiscal year 2011, the height of the program, ICE issued 15,483 detainer requests for individuals whose most serious conviction was a traffic offense. That same year, they issued 1,019 requests for immigrants convicted of murder and 933 requests for people convicted of domestic violence, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

“Under President Obama there was a large gap between the policies written on paper and the policies implemented on the ground,” said Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia, professor at the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver, who studies the intersection between immigration and the criminal justice system. “The Obama Administration was never able to get ICE field agents to accept his immigration policy.”

The majority of detainer requests submitted to local jails during the last decade were for people whose most serious conviction was, “no conviction,” according to the data.

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During the last ten years, 45 percent of the 1.8 million detainer requests ICE submitted to jails across the U.S. were for people who had no convictions.

After “no conviction” the next highest numbers of detainers issued were for DUIs, assaults, traffic offenses, burglaries and thefts. Sexual assault is 15th on the list and homicide ranks 33rd, TRAC data shows.

WHO IS A CRIMINAL ALIEN

President Donald Trump’s definition of criminal aliens – at least when it comes to ICE enforcement – is not limited to murderers and rapists. Trump’s executive order on enforcement is so broad in defining who ought to be prioritized for deportation that it essentially gets rid of prioritization and allows ICE officers to detain any unauthorized immigrant they come across.

The idea that immigration is linked with crime was a central pillar of Trump’s campaign and agenda. His executive order calls for publishing weekly reports of crimes allegedly committed by unauthorized immigrants, which critics say publicly shames immigrants who haven't been convicted of anything. Trump's fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric also criminalizes immigrants and perpetuates the myth that immigrants commit more crimes than those born in the U.S., critics say.

On April 25, ICE announced a new office to help people who have been victims of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants.

"These are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place because the people who victimized them oftentimes should not have been in the country in the first place," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Scott Kelly said.

Critics point out that another program, Victim Information and Notification Everyday, already gives crime victims information. Additionally, the move criminalizes immigrants by reducing an entire community to the single actions of a few individuals.

"They're only focusing on the negative side," said Luz Gallegos, director of TODEC, a non-profit that offers legal services to undocumented immigrants. "Why aren't they highlighting that the undocumented community contributes to our taxes, that they are consumers and business owners and so much more."

While there are a lot of anecdotal cases of people who are in the country illegally committing crimes, data shows that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

“I can’t even begin to tell you the level of frustration that I and my colleagues who do research in this area are feeling,” said Charis Kubrin, professor of criminology at University of California, Irvine. “There are very few areas in our field where the findings are so consistent and the immigration-crime relationship is one of them.”

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Kubrin and colleagues recently examined 20 years’ worth of academic research on the link between immigration and crime and found that immigration does not cause more crime. Data shows the increased immigration in cities results in either no change in crime or a reduction in crime.

But despite the research, when the president highlights examples of immigrants committing violent crimes, those anecdotes become evidence.

“That is problematic, drawing policy based on anecdotal data,” Kubrin said.

MORE ENFORCEMENT

President Trump has already expanded his predecessor’s enforcement policy by issuing an executive order that calls for hiring 5,000 border patrol agents, 10,000 immigration enforcement officers and eliminates Obama’s priority enforcement policies.

This year, ICE agents have detained a woman trying to file a restraining order against her boyfriend inside a Texas courtroom, a father dropping his kid off at school in Los Angeles and a teenager accused of stealing $2,700 from his South Carolina employer.

In April, federal authorities arrested an El Centro man who had been granted temporary deportation relief through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

In Los Angeles, while arresting an unauthorized immigrant who is also suspected of trafficking large amounts of cocaine, authorities also detained the man's wife, who does not appear to be part of the criminal investigation.

Rodriguez is just a local example of questionable enforcement nationwide that, while legal, makes people wonder why some are being targeted even though the government says they want to go after the bad immigrants.

After his arrest, Rodriguez spent five weeks in a privately-owned immigration detention center in Adelanto, Calif. Two other inmates have committed suicide in that facility this year. The first man was incarcerated on Dec. 29 and died March 28. The second entered Adelanto on Feb. 7 and died on April 13, according to media reports.

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The facility is owned by GEO group, which owns several immigration detention facilities in the country and donated $250,000 to Trump's inaugural committee. They have seen their stock price doubled since November's election. GEO Group traded at $15.93 on November 7 and was $31.85 on Wednesday.

CoreCivic, a private prison company that runs a detention center in El Centro, has seen a similar stock increase since the election. They were trading at $15.93 on November 7 and are currently at $31.84.

"The new mass incarceration is going to be in the backs of immigrants and it’s going to be in private prisons," said Kubrin, the UC Irvine criminologist.

Rodriguez’s Palm Desert church, which has hosted former President George W. Bush and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, raised more than $1,000 to contribute to his bail bond from immigration detention.

Most of the congregants of Sacred Heart Church are conservative and the overwhelming reaction to Rodriguez’s arrest has been that it is not appropriate, Father Lincoln said.

“Chasing maids and meat packers and maintenance workers and grape pickers will not go down as America’s finest hour,” Lincoln said.

Immigration Reporter Gustavo Solis can be reached at 760 778 6443 or by email at gustavo.solis@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @journogoose.