Brother steps out to answer call, is snatched by feds (The Capital Times, Madison WI)

Brother steps out to answer call, is snatched by feds
Pat Schneider — 3/06/2008 11:12 am

It was as if he had disappeared into thin air, a Madison man says of his brother, who was arrested in an immigration sweep of the city.

Family members scrambled to locate the 31-year-old man after he left the home of another relative in response to a cell phone call on the morning of Feb. 23 and vanished, said his brother, who identifies himself only as "A.J.," out of concern for members of the family, originally from the west African nation of Gambia.

"It was literally just like a kidnapping," A.J. said. The family contacted Madison police, who knew nothing about the man's whereabouts and would not open a case on a "missing" adult for 48 hours, he said. Desperate, A.J. went to the Dane County Jail to see if his brother was there, although he said he was certain his brother, with no police record, had not committed a crime.

By midnight, nearly 12 hours after his brother disappeared, the family learned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, had been making arrests in the area, A.J. said. The family located his brother at the Dodge County Jail in Juneau, where he was being held for ICE, which contracts with the jail.

ICE arrested 24 immigration violators in the Madison area, including four in Madison, Feb. 23-25 in an operation targeted at "fugitive aliens," spokesperson Gail Montenegro said.

Fugitive aliens are people in the country without proper immigration documents who have failed to appear for an immigration hearing or who absconded after having been ordered to leave the country by an immigration judge, Montenegro said in a news release announcing the arrests.

Of the 24 people seized in the Madison area however, 11 were not fugitives, but people encountered by ICE agents in the course of their operation who were unable to produce the required documentation.

ICE agents "have the authority to question anybody about their immigration status," Montenegro said in an interview. "They ask them to produce a U.S. passport or a green card."

A.J.'s brother was with family members at a gathering late that Saturday morning at an east side home to watch a soccer match, when his cell phone rang and someone asked him to go outside, A.J. said in an interview, recalling the story as told to him when he visited his brother at the Dodge County Jail on March 1. "He thought it was someone he knew."

"He went outside and never came back," A.J. recalled, leaving behind his parked car.

The circumstances, while puzzling, may have given the family more to work with than if the man had been seized elsewhere, outside the scope of family members. "That would have been so terrifying, we would have had no idea," A.J. said.

A.J. said his brother was doing "as well as can be expected" in jail.

ICE detainees are allowed to make collect phone calls between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. once they've been booked into the jail, said Tom Polsin, deputy jail administrator. Dodge County jail authorities typically pick up ICE detainees from jails around the state to which ICE agents bring arrested immigrants and where they are typically held without formal processing, he said.

Once at the Dodge County Jail, immigration detainees are held in the general population, according to classification of their alleged offenses like everybody else, Polsin said. That means someone on an immigration hold would be housed with others accused of non-violent offenses, he said.

On student visa

"Alien fugitives" seized by ICE typically are quickly deported, Montenegro said. Madison attorney Stacy Taeuber said that because A.J.'s brother did not have an outstanding deportation order, he is eligible for a hearing before a detention judge before any further action is taken against him.

A.J. said his brother came to the United States on a student visa, but was not attending school, awaiting entry to a program at Madison Area Technical College.

Taeuber said a hearing on her motion to reduce bond, now set at $15,000, was set for today. She planned to participate by telephone in the hearing before a judge in the Immigration Court in Chicago; her client was to appear by a televideo system.

A.J. said that with a hoped-for reduction, his extended family likely would be able to cover the 15 percent of the bond amount to be paid to a bail bond agent, plus collateral likely in the form of somebody's house.

"We hope to get him out on bond and retain Stacy," A.J. said. "We'll see where we go from there."

"The question that is keeping me up at night is how they came in contact with him, how they had his cell phone number," he said. "They must have had information on him, or someone turned him in."

Pat Schneider — 3/06/2008 11:12 am