OPINION:
In late August, the battered remains of Maryland woman Da’Cara Thompson were found in a grassy area off U.S. Route 50 in Anne Arundel County, just a few miles from where the 19-year-old had last been seen more than a week before.
Within days, authorities had arrested 35-year-old illegal alien Hugo Hernandez-Mendez and charged him with her murder. Mr. Hernandez-Mendez, we soon learned, had been arrested four months earlier by U.S. Park Police on charges of driving under the influence, only to be released pending trial.
In September, another illegal with a rap sheet, 37-year-old Yordanis Cobos-Martinez, was arrested in Texas after allegedly beheading his boss at a Downtown Suites motel in Dallas. (He then reportedly kicked the head into the parking lot and threw it into a dumpster.)
Mr. Cobos-Martinez, whose criminal history includes child sex abuse and carjacking, had been in U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement custody “but was released on Jan. 13 under the Biden administration,” the New York Post reported.
Last week, yet another illegal, Beto Cerillo-Bialva, 49, was charged with six counts of first-degree murder in connection with a deadly September car crash in Napa Valley, California, during which he was reportedly driving under the influence. Since his first unlawful entry into the U.S. in 1995, Mr. Cerillo-Bialva had been arrested on several other DUI charges and cocaine possession and was deported “multiple times,” ICE said.
Thanks to California’s ludicrous sanctuary policies, he had always reentered.
The list of such criminals seems to grow by the week. Is this what antifa and other rioters are so vehemently trying to safeguard with their opposition to President Trump’s sensible cleanup of major U.S. sanctuary cities: the supposed right of non-Americans who have made no attempt to reside here lawfully to remain in the United States and commit vicious crimes, including murder, within our borders?
After Mr. Hernandez-Mendez’s arrest, Aisha Braveboy, the executive of Prince George’s County, where Thompson lived, said at a press conference: “The U.S. government has made status of individuals relevant. [Mr. Hernandez-Mendez] was someone who was in their custody, and they made the decision to release him.”
That decision reportedly came about because Mr. Hernandez-Mendez was not under an ICE detainer at the time of his arrest. (That’s a request from ICE to federal, state or local law enforcement to temporarily hold an alien or notify the agency before an alien’s release.)
According to the ICE website, detainers are lodged only “after officers or agents establish probable cause to believe that an alien is removable, typically after a court has convicted them of one or more crimes, and typically when the alien poses a public safety or national security threat.”
Do they mean a security threat besides the glaring one posed by the criminal’s presence in this country? That alone should be sufficient for the agency to issue one of these requests.
Local leaders can play the blame game all they want, but the fact is that Democratic politicians and far-left activists have done everything in their power to hamstring efforts to deport people who have no legal right to be in the U.S. Long before Trump 2.0, Democrats have been railing against detainers (see Gonzalez v. ICE), seeking to stop and/or weaken them.
What’s more, ICE detainer policy depends heavily on information submitted to federal authorities by state and local law enforcement. The area of Maryland in which Mr. Hernandez-Mendez was living and cited for driving under the influence is deep blue and adjacent not just to Baltimore County — recently included on the Justice Department’s published list of sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S. — but to several sanctuary cities as well.
So the notion that ICE may not have received all pertinent, available information on Mr. Hernandez-Mendez is not exactly far-fetched.
As Mr. Trump continues his wholly justified campaign to clean up and rid America’s urban areas of criminal blight, including illegals, those screaming that he has no right to do so might take a break from pulling the face masks off ICE agents to consider something: Any one of them could be the next victim of a homicidal illegal alien.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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