 |
|
On the day of the raid, ICE questioned each migrant arrested. The agency released 300 of them, in some cases citing “humanitarian concerns.” ICE said it let single parents go, as well as releasing at least one adult in cases where the raid resulted in the arrest of both parents in a household.
The agency also hit an unknown number of migrants, including Mateo, with civil fines for allegedly lying on tax forms. Few of them realize that merely paying those fines would make them deportable and prevent them from returning to the U.S.
Within a week, Hurst had obtained indictments for 41 of the migrants, all but two of them on the felony charge of illegal reentry, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison.
Hurst also charged two people with “failure to depart,” an obscure criminal charge for ignoring a deportation order that carries a sentence of up to four years. Federal prosecutors filed only 19 failure-to-depart charges last year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse database at Syracuse University. Court records show that at least one of them was also tied to a worksite raid, which occurred last year in western Tennessee. “It’s certainly not something I’d ever seen before,” Christopher Sullivan, the court-appointed defense attorney who handled the case, told HuffPost.
|
|
|
|
