For several years, the federal government has been releasing criminal aliens with histories of violent sexual abuse and releasing them into unsuspecting communities, with little or no warning to state and local authorities, after their home countries refuse to take them back.
This revelation was made by the Boston Globe in a recent series of articles identifying the worst sexual offenders who have been released by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, at times without warning authorities in those cities. The released sexual predators make up a small number of the 6,800 criminal aliens that have been released by ICE between 2008 and 2012, but their crimes are considered the “worst of the worst”. Out of those 6,800 criminal aliens, 424 had a history of sexually-based offenses.
The criminal aliens that were released are individuals whose own countries refused to take back. Since a Supreme Court decision does not allow officials to detain them indefinitely, ICE has released them into American communities. Most alarming is that fact that according to the Boston Globe, the agency didn’t notify local law enforcement about the release of some of these convicted sex offenders. Some of them did not update their information on government registries used to track predators, as required by law.
In some of the cases the criminal aliens were listed as having been deported, when in fact they had been released into American communities. The strict policies used by the agency to protect the identity and privacy of the detainees helped conceal the information.
The information didn’t come easy for the Boston publication, which had to fight a legal battle with ICE in order to obtain details about the 6,800 criminal aliens released into the public, asserting that the information withheld by ICE put both American and immigrant lives at risk. The newspaper won the federal lawsuit in 2013, but the agency has not yet provided information on cases since 2012.
The Boston Globe claimed that some of those criminal aliens that were released since 2008 have been rearrested on new gruesome and tragic charges, citing the case of Luis Leyva Vargas, a Cuban alien who served three years in prison on the charge of having sex with a minor. Rather than be deported, Leyva was released by immigration officials in 2008, only be re-arrested two years later after he raped an 18-year-old woman at knifepoint.
Another example cited by the Boston Globe is that of 67-year-old Felix Rodriguez, who had been a convicted serial child rapist in the 1990s, but was released after Cuba refused to take him back. Months after his 2009 release, Rodriguez shot and killed his girlfriend, and is now serving a 10-year-prison sentence for the murder.
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