A count of those working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who have been charged with sex crimes or violence against women and children took a big jump on Tuesday.
The vast majority of the accused worked for Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agencies tasked with President Donald Trump’s controversial mass deportations.
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance started searching court records after it was revealed last year that an ICE supervisor in Cincinnati had a lengthy history of violence against a woman with whom he lived. His history included 23 police visits to his house.
A year earlier, a federal jury convicted an ICE deportation officer in Cincinnati of extorting sex from women over whom he held power.
An earlier version of the report listed 59 Homeland Security employees who had been charged or convicted. The newest version lists 152.
Some of the cases stretch back to the 1980s. But Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, pointed out that criminality appears to be accelerating as Trump rapidly adds agents to his border-enforcement operation.
Just under one-fourth of the charges and convictions Tramonte and her team found happened since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Fifty-six percent of those on the updated list have been sentenced for their offenses.
About 90% of all cases involve allegations of sexual abuse or gender-based violence, Tramonte said, adding that just over half involved sexual abuse of children. In just under 45% of cases, agents were alleged to have abused their official authority as they committed crimes, she said.
Questions about agents’ vetting and training grew intense last winter when ICE agents in Minneapolis shot two U.S. citizens to death under questionable circumstances.
In July another ICE officer, David Brouillette, shot and killed a Columbian man in Maine. His ex-wife and some former friends told NPR that Brouillette had a long history of racism and violence.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said it vets new agents adequately and holds them accountable when they commit abuses.
“The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors,” the spokesperson said.
“We take allegations regarding misconduct seriously and cherish the public’s trust. We work tirelessly to uphold the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable.”
Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said the list published by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance proves otherwise.
“One of the things that really stood out to me in this report is how plainly it exposed the hypocrisy of the federal immigration authorities,” he said during a virtual press conference. “We’re hearing the claims over and over again from ICE, from the White House about how they’re going after the worst of the worst.
“But we’ve known for a while that the data just doesn’t match the rhetoric. The most recent data is that about 2% of the most recent immigration court filings involve any criminality at all. Meanwhile, this report is documenting that some of the worst of the worst are in fact employed by ICE. I don’t think this is going to come as a huge surprise to the American public because we’re seeing daily the brutality on our social media feeds.”
Markowitz and Tramonte said that an obvious reform would be to acknowledge that the government is seeking to deport less than 2% of the 66,000 people detained by ICE and Border Patrol based on allegations of criminality. In other words, the overwhelming majority are being held under civil and not criminal law.
Markowitz said “cooperative enforcement strategies” should be employed with documented immigrants.
“ICE is a federal agency that enforces civil law, just like the IRS, the” Securities and Exchange Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he said. “All these other agencies enforce their laws without using handcuffs and putting people behind bars.”
Those agencies can start a process that leads to criminal charges, “but their first instinct is not to initiate punitive enforcement actions to bring the harshest penalty possible. Instead they try to help the regulated entity to come into compliance.”
Markowitz said immigration authorities have pathways to do something similar.
“Unfortunately, ICE is doing exactly the opposite,” he said. “They’re creating enforcement problems instead of solving enforcement problems.”
(0) comments
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In
Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.