Quote :

"Scores of federal immigration agents from around the country, some wearing cowboy hats and brandishing shotguns and automatic weapons, endangered residents and local police officers last week as they raided homes in Nassau County in a poorly planned antigang operation, county officials charged yesterday. Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau County police commissioner, said that in two instances the immigration agents mistakenly drew their guns on Nassau County police detectives during operations that resulted in the arrests of 186 immigrants on Long Island. Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, said yesterday that he was demanding an investigation into the agents’ conduct by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mr. Mulvey said that many United States citizens and legal residents were rousted from bed and were required to produce papers during an operation so ill-conceived that all but 6 out of 96 administrative warrants issued by the immigration enforcement agency in the search for gang members had wrong or outdated addresses. In one case, agents were seeking a 28-year-old man with a photo taken when he was 7. Of more than 90 people arrested in Nassau County, most were illegal immigrant workers with no criminal record, Mr. Mulvey said, some with young children who were frightened by the immigration agents’ “inappropriate” behavior. “There were clear dangers of friendly fire,” he said of the operation, in which Nassau police provided standby support. In a sharply worded letter to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, Mr. Suozzi asked for an investigation into what he called “serious allegations of misconduct and malfeasance committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel in executing arrest warrants in various Nassau County communities on Sept. 24 and 26, 2007.” Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge of the raids for the agency, denied the charges. “All those allegations that he’s making, they’re without merit,” he said. Only one of 180 special agents assigned to the operation from the agency’s Office of Investigations was wearing a cowboy hat out of personal preference, he said. “We didn’t have warrants,” he added. “We don’t need warrants to make the arrests. These are illegal immigrants.” But in fact, Mr. Smith said, one of the 186 arrested last week turned out to be a United States citizen. “I believe it was a woman in Westbury,” he said. The woman, he said, was released after an hour or two either with taxi fare or a ride home. “That is not uncommon,” he said of the citizen’s mistaken arrest as a deportable immigrant. He noted that the unit’s 7,000 special agents have conducted similar operations around the country in recent years. “You’re arresting individuals who are in association, they’re in the area, they’re in houses that are known for illegal aliens. Gang members were going to be there.” But Mr. Mulvey said that in most cases the federal agents did not seem to have good reason to believe gang members would be present. They repeatedly passed up the invitation to check a list of 96 deportable gang associates active in Nassau County against a local police database that is updated daily, he said. They also broke promises to share a list of targets, and failed to attend a preoperation briefing, he added. “You have to have some reason to believe the target will be there when you enter a home,” Mr. Mulvey, said. “When you have 96 warrants and you only find six of them, it’s hard to make the argument that you had a good faith basis to enter those houses.” Mr. Mulvey said that his department had agreed to have uniformed officers present at the raids in case they resulted in local drug or weapons charges. They did not. He said he withdrew all support on Thursday, before a third night of raids, vowing not to join future operations. In contrast, Mr. Mulvey said, the department conducted a smooth and successful antigang operation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in April. Nassau has the lowest crime rate in the nation for a county of its size, Mr. Mulvey said, in part because the police have good cooperation from the community. The conduct of the raids could undermine that relationship, he added. “I was misled,” Mr. Mulvey said. “In good conscience, I can’t continue to cooperate unless these problems are ironed out.” Among the problems, he wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to Joseph A. Palmese, resident agent in charge of the immigration agency’s Office of Investigations in Bohemia, N.Y., was that the Nassau police could not even get a list of the 40 people arrested Monday night, leaving local officials unable to deal with a deluge of missing persons reports and inquiries from churches whose members had disappeared. Only three of the 40 were gang members, he said. By then, he added, complaints were coming not only from immigrant advocates, but from his own officers who had seen what they said was the undisciplined conduct of the federal agents. “These are my people that came to me,” he said in an interview after the news conference held at the Nassau County Police Department in Mineola. “These are aggressive gang enforcement investigators. Day in, day out, they work the streets, arresting gang members, and it’s unusual for them to come to me like that.” In Suffolk County, the police commissioner, Richard Dormer, expressed complete support for the operation. “We will continue to support their efforts,” he said in a written statement. “The gang members and violent felons have now been removed from the streets of Suffolk County, which will come as a great relief to the parents who tell us on a regular basis about their concerns that their own children will be lured into gang activity or targeted by gang members in their communities.” Just how many gang members and associates were taken into custody, and how they were categorized, remains uncertain. Mr. Smith said that in Suffolk County, the raids resulted in the arrests of 15 identified as gang members, and 50 as “associates of gang members.” Mr. Dormer provided different figures. He said 85 were arrested and 55 were gang members or associates. And while Mr. Smith said 59 out of 186 arrested in both counties had criminal records, Mr. Dormer said 61 of those arrested in Suffolk County alone had criminal records and 14 were violent felons. Mr. Smith said the agency did not count up the number of homes that agents searched where they found neither gang members nor illegal immigrants, only citizens and legal residents. “These people are very transient,” he said of those being hunted. “They don’t stay at that location. We keep going to these different places until we find them.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/nyregion/03raid.html

10/4/2007 4:06:21 PM

Quote :

"Her son Christopher, 17, a high school senior, opened the door, and more than a dozen federal immigration agents and one Suffolk County police officer pushed past him, he said later. Only after the agents had herded her other children into the living room, frightened her aunt and uncle, and drawn a gun on a family friend staying in the basement, Ms. Delarosa-Delgado said, did she awake to discover that her house in Huntington Station had been the mistaken target of a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was not the first time. In the summer of 2006, she said, agents waving the same photo of a deportable immigrant named Miguel had stormed into her house before dawn. No Miguel has ever lived there, she said — at least not since she bought the place in 2003. This time, the raid on her house was part of a series of antigang sweeps on Long Island. The raids, which resulted in 186 immigrant arrests, were denounced by officials in Nassau County as riddled with mistakes and marked by misconduct. But on Ms. Delarosa-Delgado’s side of the county line, the Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, hailed the sweeps as a successful operation that made the community safer. Ms. Delarosa-Delgado, 42, a school aide who was born in the Dominican Republic, moved to the United States 24 years ago and became a citizen in 1990, does not feel safer. “It’s not right,” she said. “My kids were scared. They had to sit in the living room like little criminals.” “Sure, look for criminals. But they’ve got to make 100 percent sure that the house they’re going into, the person’s there. They can’t come in just because my address pops up in the computer.” Suffolk County police officials said they stood by their statements praising the raids. But Ms. Delarosa-Delgado’s complaint is one of many that have been emerging in Suffolk County as employers, church workers and lawyers learn who was arrested. “They took guys who I see in church every single week, whose homes I’ve gone into and everything,” said Sister Margaret Smyth, a nun who attends church in Greenport, where she said 12 immigrant men were arrested last Thursday. “Some of them work on farms, some of them work construction,” she said. “They’re family men.” One man who was arrested, Walter Tzun, has been in the country for a decade, she said. She described him as married, a father, a taxpayer and a construction worker whose employer has been trying to sponsor him for a green card. He has been moved from a New Jersey jail to two detention centers in Pennsylvania, she said, and has been told that he is headed to Texas. She said the man’s boss drove to Pennsylvania “to try to bond him out” and help him stay. Eberhard Müller, formerly the executive chef of the restaurant Lutèce and now the owner of a 180-acre farm on the East End of Long Island, said he had spent a week trying to locate the brother, cousin and roommate of one of his workers, a legal immigrant from El Salvador. The three were arrested in a raid at their home in Greenport early last Thursday, he said, leaving babies and two distraught wives behind. Mr. Müller said he finally learned with the help of a lawyer that two of the three, Omar Mena Lopez and Marvin Lopez, were at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and that one, Valentin Rudy Escobar Montenegro, was in a detention center in York, Pa. “They accuse them of being gang associates, which makes no sense,” Mr. Müller said, describing all three as holding down two or three jobs as roofers, restaurant workers and farmhands. “Marvin Lopez is a librarian in his country, the sweetest person in the world. He works 14 hours a day, seven days a week. How is he able to be a gang member?” Accounts of the Suffolk County raids are similar to those criticized in Nassau County. “These were like dragnets being cast over entire houses,” said Nadia Marin-Molina, director of the Workplace Project, an immigrant advocacy organization in Hempstead that has gathered many of the complaints. The complaints echo a federal lawsuit filed last month in Manhattan contending that immigration agents unlawfully force their way into the homes of Latino families in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable searches. “We have been inundated with calls,” said Cesar Perales, director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which filed the lawsuit. “People are terrified by these indiscriminate raids.” Mr. Perales said yesterday that by week’s end he would seek an emergency restraining order to stop such raids."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/nyregion/04raid.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

10/4/2007 4:06:43 PM

summary please

10/4/2007 4:10:33 PM

What does God need with a starship?

10/4/2007 8:28:35 PM

for someone who has ADD, you sure do post some long ass articles.

10/4/2007 8:50:12 PM

Quote :

"Mr. Perales said yesterday that by week’s end he would seek an emergency restraining order to stop such raids.""

God, can you imagine how awesome that would be? Federal agents show up to arrest someone and they end up getting arrested for trespassing and illegal use of a firearm.

I always wondered what happens if a state government stopped enforcing federal statutes. Can a government or state supreme court be arrested by federal agents for undermining Federal Authority?

[Edited on October 4, 2007 at 9:16 PM. Reason : sp]

10/4/2007 9:15:45 PM

generally state law enforcement only enforce/charge state crimes, feds charge fed violations - 2 separate court systems (state / federal)

the fed prosecutors (us attorneys) can "adopt" state cases that also violate a federal statute

10/10/2007 11:30:27 PM