Brother steps out to answer call, is snatched by feds

Pat Schneider
March 6, 2008

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."

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤