ICE’s sex offender policies under scrutiny
Globe investigation finds many violent sex offenders released but not closely tracked or forced to register
GLOBE GRAPHIC
Santos Hernandez Carrera had raped a woman at knifepoint and spent roughly half his life in jail.
For years, doctors warned federal immigration officials: Do not take your eyes off Santos Hernandez Carrera.
He had raped a woman at knifepoint and spent roughly half his life in jail, where immigration officials hoped to keep him until they could send him home to Cuba. As far as the public knew, the strategy worked: Until last month, the public sex offender registry said Hernandez Carrera, who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, had been deported.
He never was. Instead, the Globe discovered that Hernandez Carrera is in Florida, one of hundreds of immigrants convicted of sex crimes who should have been deported but instead were released in the United States because their homelands refused to take them back.
They are convicted rapists, child molesters, and kidnappers — among “the worst of the worst,” as one law enforcement agency put it. Yet the Globe found that immigration officials have released them without making sure they register with local authorities as sex offenders.
And once US Immigration and Customs Enforcement frees them, agency officials often lose track of the criminals, despite outstanding deportation orders against them. The Globe determined that Hernandez Carrera and several other offenders had failed to register as sex offenders, a crime. By law, police are supposed to investigate if such offenders fail to update their address within days of their release. But local officials said they did not learn that ICE had released the offenders until after the Globe inquired about their cases.
“It’s chilling,” said Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a former deputy assistant US attorney general who led a 2008 federal court battle to keep Hernandez Carrera locked up. “These are dangerous and predatory individuals who should not be prowling the streets. In fact, they should not be in the United States at all.”
Legal challenges
These released criminals are immigrants who were convicted of sex-related crimes and ordered deported, sometimes after serving a state or federal prison term. But if their home country will not take them back, ICE says they must release them after six months because the Supreme Court in 2001 barred the agency from holding immigrants indefinitely. Officials said they can detain such immigrants longer only in rare cases, such as when a detainee is ruled mentally ill and dangerous.
Until recent changes, ICE’s sex-offender notification process varied widely across the United States. Sometimes ICE officials informed local officials when they released or deported a sex offender. Sometimes they didn’t.
The immigration agency does not disclose the names of the immigrants in its custody, to protect their privacy. But the Globe obtained the names of Hernandez Carrera and thousands of other released criminals through a federal lawsuit against ICE, arguing that the privacy policy endangered Americans and immigrants alike.
Though the federal judge sided with the Globe, ICE has provided complete records only for the criminals freed from 2008 to 2012, the year the Globe filed the lawsuit. The Globe has demanded a more current list, but ICE has not supplied it.
Using the 2008 to 2012 list with names of more than 6,800 criminals, the Globe identified 424 released immigrants who had previously been convicted of sex-related crimes, including 209 who had appeared in the national public sex offender registry. Of the 209, 53 failed to re-register after ICE released them — including four from New England.
The Globe could not determine from the information ICE provided whether the remaining 215 criminals convicted of sex-related crimes were legally required to register upon their release. Federal law sets minimum standards, but sex offender registration requirements still vary by state. In Massachusetts, for example, the law requires a sex offender moving here from another state to register within two days.
At least 34 of the 424 released sex offenders — including some who did register with local police — were back in jail as of last month, state records show, some for heinous crimes committed after ICE released them.
Immigration officials tried to deport Luis-Leyva Vargas, 47, to Cuba after he served three years in a Florida prison for unlawful sex with a teen. In 2008, officials released him. Two years later, he kidnapped an 18-year-old in Rockingham County, Va., at knifepoint and raped her. Now he is serving a 55-year prison sentence.
Felix Rodriguez, a 67-year-old sex offender convicted of raping children as young as 4 in the 1990s, was freed in 2009, also because Cuba would not take him back. Months later, he fatally shot his girlfriend in Kansas City. He pleaded guilty and is serving 10 years in a Missouri prison.
Andrew Rui Stanley, convicted in 2000 of multiple counts of sodomizing a child when Stanley was 14, was released in 2009 after Brazil failed to provide a passport needed to send him home. For the next two years, he viciously abused three children in St. Louis and now, at age 31, will be in prison for the rest of his life.
The goal of registering sex offenders is to inform the police, and if required, the public,largely through online sex offender registries, that an offender is living in the community.
ICE told the Globe in April that federal law historically has not authorized the agency to require someone to register as a sex offender when they are released from agency custody. But ICE said it had been working on a new policy, for a year and a half, to notify states when they identify a sex offender among those to be released.
Then in May, after the Globe identified more unregistered sex offenders released across the United States, ICE signed up for a Department of Justice system that lets them send electronic alerts to law enforcement and state agencies when they release a sex offender.
Since the Globe began making inquiries, ICE has also pledged to warn sex offenders that they must register with local law enforcement after their release, and ICE will demand written proof of that registration within 10 days. Officials will also require that immigrant sexual offenders register in a sexual deviancy counseling program, if their state requires it.
ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said immigration agents have notified law enforcement of sex offenders’ release “in many cases” in the past, even though they were not required to. But she said the new policy “will serve to enhance public safety by notifying the appropriate authorities in each instance of the release of a sex offender and notifying the offender of their requirement to register.”
The Department of Justice hailed immigration officials’ decision to join the system in May.
“They’re starting to make notifications,” said Dawn Doran, deputy director of the department’s Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking, which runs the system. “This is a step in the right direction.”
ICE is an important part of the registration process, watchdogs say, because it is a federal agency that often moves detainees around the country, sometimes far from where they were living, and may release them in a place where local law enforcement is unaware of their history.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan research agency for Congress, hasurged ICE since August 2013 to do a better job notifying local law enforcement of released sex offenders.
“Even if you don’t have a legal responsibility, sometimes there are things that are just the right thing to do,” David Maurer, director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team, said in a telephone interview with the Globe.
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