JASPER, Oct 22, 2008
Twenty illegal immigrants in Dubois, Spencer, Daviess and four other southern Indiana counties were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in a three-day enforcement action that began Friday and ended Sunday.
ICE came targeting immigration fugitives who had been through immigration court, were ordered deported by a federal immigration judge and who failed to comply with the judge's order, according to Gail Montenegro, an ICE spokeswoman in Chicago.
The ICE arrests were made at homes, workplaces and places of business in Jasper, Huntingburg, Dale, Washington, Evansville, New Albany, Seymour and Columbus. The Jasper Police Department assisted with the enforcement action late Friday morning after being contacted by ICE agents who were already in the area, according to Police Chief Doug Tarvin.
The Jasper officers accompanied ICE agents to a Jasper apartment complex, Tarvin said. Other locations the ICE agents reportedly went to included the YMCA in Washington, Farbest Foods and a manufacturing factory in Huntingburg and the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jasper, according to local authorities and those working with the local Hispanic community.
At the YMCA in Washington, Estaquio "Taco" Revolorio, Vine Street, was arrested with on outstanding warrant Friday, according to sources within the Washington Police Department. Revolorio, an assistant soccer coach with the Washington Catholic boys soccer team, had reportedly been on the run for six years.
WC head coach Tom Tucker said he did not know Revolorio, a local business owner, was wanted on charges. Tucker said Revolorio had lived in the country for 20 years. Washington Catholic, Tucker said, had no previous knowledge of Revolorio's past.
"I think he was a bridge between the Hispanic and the American communities," Tucker said. "I treasured his friendship and he was good for this community."
Huntingburg Police Chief Ron Drew said ICE gave no notice of its most recent operation. Several months ago, ICE agents came to Huntingburg and requested assistance from his department in searching for an individual, Drew said. Not so this time.
Huntingburg police discovered ICE agents were in the area when seven of their vehicles and 14 agents came to a south-side convenience store where two Huntingburg officers were getting a morning cup of coffee, according to Drew. The ICE agents told the Huntingburg officers that they would be operating in the area at that time, according to the chief.
Of the 20 people arrested in the seven-county area in this region, seven were fugitives with outstanding deportation orders, while the 13 others were found during the operation to have been in the United States illegally. They were people encountered during ICE's efforts to track down fugitive targets, according to Montenegro.
Chief Jailer Randy Schnell with the Dubois County Sheriff's Department said five individuals caught during the sweep were temporarily held at the Dubois County Security Center on Friday while the agents made their way to locations in Huntingburg and Jasper. Of those, one man had been deported twice since 1999, according to Schnell. The ICE agents, who had a photograph of the individual with them, arrested him at a Huntingburg factory.
Schnell said no one came to the jail Saturday or Sunday on immigration violations, so he suspects that agents were active in Dubois County only on Friday.
An ICE agent who routinely comes to the county security center from Louisville to question local residents about their immigration status let Schnell know agents were in the area Friday. At one factory, the ICE officer told Schnell, agents told a human resources official that they did not intend to hinder production at the facility, nor were they looking to find and detain everyone with a possible immigration violation.
"They said, 'We have a list and we're just here for those on the list.' They weren't there to question every single employee," Schnell said.
Ted Seger, president of Farbest Foods, said ICE agents came to his plant Friday morning with a warrant pertaining to a single employee. The man was not at work that day and the agents left within 10 minutes to search for him at home. Seger did not know if they encountered the man.
At the Perdue processing plant in Washington, first and second shifts were shut down on Monday. According to Julie DeYoung of Perdue, the shut down was due to a mechanical failure and not due to ICE officals.
"ICE has not been at our facility," DeYoung said. "We heard it through the grapevine that ICE was in the area."
Rumors of three busloads of illegal immigrants taken from Perdue were also untrue. Washington City police were also made aware of ICE agents in the area, but only after the arrest of Revolorio was made. During Revolorio's arrest, he was reportedly in an altercation that sent one ICE agent to a hospital for treatment. Local officers were call in to help with an arrest on Sunday when Hugo Cervantez was located and fled the scene leaving two children behind. Cervantez was eventually located and detained by ICE.
ICE has a policy of not releasing the names of those arrested on administrative, rather than criminal, violations, according to Montenegro.
In addition to the southern Indiana enforcement action, ICE agents also arrested fugitives in Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas and Missouri during the same three-day time frame, Montenegro said. More than 100 people total were taken into custody.
Those arrested were taken to Chicago-area county jails and county jails in Wisconsin where ICE contracts jail space to house immigration detainees.
The ICE office in Chicago oversees a six-state region that includes Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.
News of the ICE enforcement action quickly spread throughout the local Hispanic community and appeared to spur some disruption.
In the Southwest Dubois School Corp., 17 to 18 percent of students hail from Hispanic families, according to Southridge Middle School Principal Al Mihajlovits. At his school, absences among students from Hispanic families appeared to have edged up slightly Monday and Tuesday, but not significantly so, he said.
Seger said attendance was down Monday at the Huntingburg plant a little more than is typical. He could not say whether the ICE action was the cause. He added that Farbest Foods has operated on all shifts Monday and today and had experienced "very little interruption."
Sister Karen Durliat, associate director of the Guadalupe Center in Huntingburg, an outreach organization for Hispanic immigrants, and Susan Brouillette, constituent services director for U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., were working to identify those taken into custody so families could visit them before they are deported.
ICE was established in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The law enforcement arms of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the former U.S. Customs Service were folded into the new agency.
During the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the Chicago ICE office apprehended more than 1,400 fugitives with outstanding deportation orders in its six-state region, according to Montenegro.
Herald Staff Writer Candy Neal and Times-Herald Staff Writer Nate Smith contributed to this report.
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