Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on Wednesday blasted the newly enacted Colorado law that prevents local jails from keeping people in custody for ICE past their release dates, calling out the case of a Cuban immigrant accused of attempted murder after being released from the Arapahoe County jail in October.
Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office
Osmani Garces-Ortiz
But Arapahoe County sheriff’s officials say that not only has their policy on handling federal immigration requests not changed since 2014, they notified ICE three hours before Osmani Garces-Ortiz was released on bond.
Garces-Ortiz, 37, is in the United States illegally and had his bid for permanent residency denied because of his criminal history, according to ICE’s field office in Denver. He’s now facing charges he tried to kill someone while out on bond in an unrelated criminal case.
ICE officials say Garces-Ortiz was able to commit additional crime because of Colorado House Bill 1124, the “sanctuary law” that prohibited the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office from complying with the federal agency’s Oct. 25 detainer request that Garces-Ortiz be held until ICE agents decided whether or not to pick him up and place him in immigration detention.
“ICE wants to make it abundantly clear, Arapahoe County was not required to notify ICE regarding Garces’ release under the newly enacted law,” ICE spokeswoman Alethea Smock said in a news release Wednesday.
But the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office did notify ICE, said Detention Services Bureau Chief Vince Line. The sheriff’s office alerted ICE at 3:27 p.m on the day Garces-Ortiz was scheduled to be released. He was released from custody at 6:27 p.m. The jail followed the same procedures it has been following since 2014, Line said.
“We notified them in plenty of time to get here,” he said.
When asked about the Arapahoe sheriff’s notification, Smock said the sheriff’s office did inform ICE of Garces-Ortize’s detention — but not of his release time.
Handling ICE detainers
Immigration detainers are written requests for local jails to hold an inmate for up to an additional 48 hours beyond their scheduled release, allowing ICE agents to decide whether to take the person into custody so that he or she can be placed in immigration detention while the agency initiates removal proceedings.
The practice has been controversial and its application previously has been inconsistent across sheriffs’ offices in Colorado. Opponents have called the voluntary holds an unconstitutional detention of people without probable cause and have successfully challenged them in some courts. ICE officials call the cooperation between federal, state and local law enforcement critical to public safety and essential to the agency’s mission.
In Arapahoe County, Line said, any administrative detainer requests from ICE are noted in the inmate’s file. Before the person is scheduled to be released, jail officials notify ICE, and ICE agents can contact the person in the jail’s public lobby. They are not custody transfers, Line said, and the jail has operated that way for the past five years.
Still, ICE’s Smock said, the problems with the new law remain: ICE agents can’t detain someone who is in custody at a local jail in a controlled environment, knowing the person is unarmed.
The situation is different if ICE has a warrant to arrest a person, signed by a judge. Warrants, however, are not administrative like detainer requests, and House Bill 1124 takes that into account.
“We would honor that like any other warrant because it would provide a legal reason for (transferring) custody,” Line said. ICE, however, did not have a signed warrant for Garces-Ortiz.
No legal mechanism exists for a judge to issue a criminal warrant for an administrative immigration arrest and sanctuary policies don’t recognize federal jurisdiction to enforce immigration law, as mandated by Congress, according to ICE.
ICE officials contend the new law is a detriment to Coloradans’ public safety.
“It was absolutely predictable that innocent residents would suffer at the hands of criminal aliens when Colorado’s heinous sanctuary bill was signed into law,” said John Fabbricatore, deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Denver, in the news release. “Because of this law, our ICE office was not notified when a criminal alien was released on bail, and this alien is now charged with attempted murder. How many more terrible crimes will be committed, because lawmakers put political agendas before public safety?”
Line said he doesn’t know of other cases in which inmates with immigration detainers were released from the jail and then committed other crimes, but he noted that people in Arapahoe County and across the state and nation who get released on bond without immigration detainers sometimes go out and commit other crimes.
“It would not be surprising to me at all,” he said.
Attempted-murder arrest
Aurora police arrested Garces-Ortiz on Nov. 21 on suspicion of attempted murder, first-degree assault with serious bodily injury with a deadly weapon, first-degree burglary, felony menacing, violation of bail bond conditions and a violent crime involving the use of a weapon, according to Colorado court records.
Details of the new allegations against Graces-Ortiz are unclear.
On Wednesday, Aurora police declined to comment on his case, saying it already has been forwarded to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office for prosecution. The Denver Post requested arrest documents from the court related to the incident and charges, but they were not immediately available Wednesday.
Garces-Ortiz was arrested in September on suspicion of felony trespassing, violation of bail bond conditions, felony possession of a controlled substance and violation of a protection order before his October release on bond. His criminal history in Colorado includes convictions for misdemeanor driving while under restraint, possession of a controlled substance and harassment, court records show.
He entered the country illegally on March 31, 2008, by way of Key West, Florida, and was granted an immigration waiver and released, according to ICE. That waiver expired Nov. 3, 2012, and though he applied for permanent residency, his request was denied Aug. 21, 2015.
