ICE is doing well in Austin

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-Austin has changed. People from ICE are always looking around, hoping someone picked up by the Travis County Sheriff or some other law enforcement officer - will turn out to be undocumented.
Interesting how Texas' most liberal city has turned into a police state.

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IMMIGRATION

More illegal immigrants are being charged criminally in Austin

Prison time comes before deportation for some.

By Steven Kreytak
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

His mother had suffered a stroke, and his family needed money. So even though he had been deported once from the United States last year, Edgar Rodriguez-Sarmiento left his home in a rural Honduran village, paid a smuggler $2,000 to get him across the border and sought work while living in an Austin apartment off East Riverside Drive in January, according to court documents and his lawyer.

Six weeks later, Rodriguez was arrested on public intoxication charges and brought to the Travis County Jail. He was tagged by immigration agents and became enmeshed in a federal effort to charge even those with minor or no criminal history with the crime of re-entering the U.S. after deportation, a felony.

The effort, part of a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration, has led to a surge in the number of undocumented immigrants in Austin who are being hit with a felony conviction, and sometimes sent to prison, before being deported.

The practice has been criticized by immigrant advocates and defense lawyers, who call it a waste of resources...

A recent report by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had filed 8,064 cases nationwide in February, a 43.8 percent increase compared with February 2007.

"There's a strong push to enforce the immigration laws and to be more aggressive," Sutton said. "Criminal illegal aliens are being prosecuted where maybe sometimes in the past they weren't."

Until two years ago, Sutton's office had a long-standing practice of prosecuting for illegal re-entry only immigrants who had previously committed an aggravated felony, such as rape, burglary or drug trafficking, or who had been deported and re-entered the country numerous times. The 2006 increase in cases against some immigrants with minor or no criminal histories appeared to be part of a national crackdown. But Sutton said at the time that there wouldn't be a sustained increase in those cases. There wasn't, until this year.

Adrian Ramirez, a San Antonio-based assistant field director for ICE's detention and removal division, said things changed in December or January after agency officials met with federal prosecutors in Washington. After that meeting, Ramirez said, agents were told to bring the cases of any immigrant who had been previously deported, even if they had no significant criminal history, to the U.S. attorney's office, which had agreed to prosecute them.

"They wanted a big push on that," Ramirez said. "Prosecution is a deterrent, especially for people who have already had an opportunity to be here, were deported and came back."

Ramirez oversees immigration agents who look for undocumented immigrants in prison and jails, including the Travis County Jail, where the increased presence of immigration agents this year has drawn protests in Austin.

ICE officials have said that from January 1 through March 31, the agency placed 763 immigration holds on inmates at the Travis County Jail — an almost 400 percent increase from the same period last year. That means that after the cases of those inmates are adjudicated, ICE is contacted to take possession of the person. Most are deported immediately, Ramirez said. The ones who have previously been deported are referred to the U.S. attorney's office, which prosecutes them in federal court...

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