Shortly before federal agents arrested 24 Latinos outside a Fells Point 7-Eleven in January 2007, the acting field office director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore told a deputy "to bring more bodies in," according to an internal ICE report.
The roundup at the 7-Eleven occurred after the official told that deputy "to go back out to make more arrests, as the quantity of arrests that were made that morning was unacceptable," said the report. It appears to contradict previous statements by ICE officials that the agents were taking a drink break Jan. 23, 2007, when they happened to be approached by Latino laborers who thought they were contractors in need of workers.
Immigrant advocates, who had obtained the report under a public records request, released it yesterday, saying it shows that a "broken" immigration system has unfairly targeted Latinos who were not guilty of any crimes.
An ICE spokeswoman said yesterday that John Torres, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, "has referred the matter for further investigation." The spokeswoman, Ernestine Fobbs, said Torres wants a review into whether agents "provided inconsistent statements and accounts of the incident."
The agents felt pressure from supervisors to round up possible illegal immigrants to "produce statistics," the report said. The acting field office director, identified in press reports as John D. Alderman, "didn't really care where they had to go and whether the aliens were fugitive or not, he just wanted them to bring more bodies in." Fugitive aliens are those with deportation orders.
Where they went was the 7-Eleven on South Broadway, a place Baltimore police officers had told ICE agents was a gathering spot for Latino laborers, the report states. Among the men arrested was a janitor headed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his young son was being treated for cancer.
"The evidence supports that the 7-Eleven store was visited at the suggestion of one of the deportation officers" while agents were traveling to another "targeted location" in Baltimore, a pizzeria.
"The evidence revealed that the Fugitive Operations officers were ordered to seek additional arrests that day due to managerial pressure to produce statistics for Operation Return to Sender," it says.
