Immigration raids net 280

SAN JOSE, Calif. – In the largest such operation in its six-year history, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested 280 foreign nationals in California with criminal records in a three-day enforcement surge that ended Thursday night.

Surprisingly, however, the operation drew little of the harsh criticism that has accompanied past ICE raids. The reason: The operation was extremely targeted, focusing solely on capturing immigrants with criminal records.

It signaled a shift in the enforcement priorities of ICE in the age of President Barack Obama and the Department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano.

ICE reported that about 80 percent of the immigrants taken into custody had prior convictions for serious or violent crimes such as rape, armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Also arrested were 30 convicted sex offenders, many of whom had been found guilty of sexually assaulting children.

“These are not people we want walking our streets,” John Morton, the Homeland Security assistant secretary who oversees ICE, said at a Friday news conference in Los Angeles. “We’re going to focus on those people who choose to pursue a life of crime in the United States rather than pursue the American dream of education, hard work and success.”

ICE had been under intense criticism for using its fugitive operations teams to arrest illegal immigrants indiscriminately to meet quotas. A report released in February by the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., found that 73 percent of the nearly 97,000 people arrested by the teams from 2003 to early 2008 were undocumented immigrants without criminal records.

In stark contrast, all but six of the 286 people arrested in this week’s operation had criminal records. The only others arrested in the operation were six people who had deportation orders, said Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman.

“It does seem like they did a lot more careful job of arresting just the people they were targeting,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who headed the old Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. “It sounds exactly the way a sophisticated, federally led operation should take place.”

The special operation involved more than 400 agents from ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and several other state and local agencies, Kice said.

In a memo dated Tuesday, Morton said their core mission was to arrest people with final deportation orders, including those with criminal records.

A copy of the guidelines obtained by the Associated Press directs teams to focus at least 70 percent of resources on these immigrants, followed by those who have re-entered the country illegally or who have committed crimes.

The memo also said agents will be trained twice a year on the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizures, and should not arrest immigrants who are sick, disabled or the sole caretakers of children.

Of those arrested in the enforcement surge, Kice said, more than 100 have already been removed from the country.

She said at least 17 of the people taken into custody will face further federal prosecution, most for re-entering the country illegally after a formal deportation.

Associated Press contributed to this report.