How ironic is this?
(CNN) Wilson Rodriguez Macarreno and his family were in trouble, so he did what he knew to do — call police for help. About an hour later, he was in ICE custody.
Rodriguez’s detention on Thursday sent shockwaves through the Seattle-suburb and is now garnering national attention from advocates, warning the way authorities handled the case could make immigrants scared to call police to report crimes.
Early Thursday morning, Rodriguez saw someone trespassing on his property in Tukwila, Washington. In the last few weeks, someone had been repeatedly trying to break-in to his home and car.
So, he called 9-1-1.Police arriving on scene apprehended a trespasser according to Rodriguez’s lawyer Luis Cortes.
After giving officers his ID for what he thought was “report purposes,” police put Rodriguez in handcuffs, his lawyer said. After running his information through the National Crime Information Center database, officers saw he had an outstanding warrant.
Less than an hour after making a simple trespassing call, Rodriguez was headed toward an uncertain future as he was driven to an ICE field office in Seattle for processing. His lawyer says ICE never arrived to pick up his client, so Tukwila police officers volunteered to take him to the ICE field office.
The supposed trespasser was not arrested, as there was no probably cause. Rodriguez, who’s trespassing on U.S. soil, was arrested. Rather ironic, is it not?
Of course, this article, and the starting point at the Seattle Times, has brought on much of the same old same old hand-wringing, whining about it being an administrative warrant (which, shocker, is legal) without judicial involvement, about why those big meanie police officers would dare do the job of law enforcement and involve themselves with a federal warrant, and the old canard about illegals now being afraid to call La Polizia. And, of course, the Tukwila PD has promised to change the way the follow the law to protect illegals.
Rodriguez entered the US from Honduras in 2004, fleeing violence his lawyer says took his brother and a friend. Rodriguez says his brother died from a gunshot to the head and his friend was found chopped to pieces. CNN could not verify these claims.
His lawyer says that ICE did apprehend him in Texas in 2004, but Rodriguez missed his court date — he did not have an address to send the court notice. Cortes says his client has no criminal history.
He illegally entered the nation, was busted, told to report to court, blew the date off, and has now been apprehended. Poor decisions have consequences. As far as it goes, ICE hasn’t released any details on Rodriguez at this time.
Related, Jazz Shaw discusses a case where an illegal alien complains that ICE is, get this, deporting illegal aliens. And, in this case, there’s a bit more to the story about one of these “upstanding” illegals that the media likes to yammer about.
