The Chicago Police Department reported on Wednesday the arrest of an immigrant from Venezuela who was allegedly armed with a handgun and 43 rounds of ammunition.
Police confronted 21-year-old Venezuela native Jan Torres-Roman on the 5100 block of South Indiana on the evening of May 5 after the city’s ShotSpotter gunfire detection system caught a disturbance nearby. When officers arrived, they heard a gunshot, observed Torres-Roman running from the scene with a gun in his hand, and gave chase, according to CWBChiago.
Officials say that the immigrant is seen on surveillance video approaching a car while gripping his waist. He then reportedly places a gun under the auto’s passenger seat, then hides a box with 43 rounds of ammunition under a garbage bag in a gas station parking lot. The police also reported that the gun was stolen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Despite being allegedly armed with a gun and apprehended at the scene of a shooting incident, Judge David Kelly released Torres-Roman from custody. Torres-Roman already ignored a scheduled hearing on May 13.
Venezuelan immigrant crime has soared in Chicago. As of April, more than 1,000 Venezuelan immigrants had been arrested in Chicago in 2024.
As Breitbart News reported in April, Venezuelan immigrants make up only 1.5 percent of Chicago’s population but have accounted for 11.11 percent of all arrests thus far in 2024, and that is just looking at arrest records containing country of origin.
At least 21 of those arrests were made in cases of violent felonies, including one incident in which a Venezuelan immigrant was charged with rape after accosting a woman when she got off the subway.
The growing number of arrests of Venezuelans in Chicago during the first half of 2024 has carried over from 2023 when the Chicago Police Department released data showing that arrests of Venezuelan immigrants skyrocketed more than 11,000 percent since 2021.
Chicago Police Department records show that only six Venezuelan immigrants were arrested in 2021, but, by late November 2023, nearly 700 Venezuelans had been arrested.
Chicago City Councilman Raymond Lopez (D) decried the crime breaking out around the city’s migrant shelters.
“Politically, we have an environment that is making excuses for those low-level offenses as something that should be forgiven or ignored without realizing that it has a very real snowball effect in our neighborhoods,” Lopez told the media.
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