Former Immigration Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan emphasized to this writer at a Sunday conference that the federal “ICE protects the public every day.” ICE’s performance in Georgia, as well as that of many aggressive prosecutors, bears that out. Georgia’s record number of arrests and prosecutions of alien smugglers and illegal aliens now mirrors a national trend.
One case in point: Jaime Chavez-Guevara took a bus from El Salvador to Panama, where smugglers ferried him to a cargo ship. He and one of the smugglers climbed up the anchor chain and sneaked in through the anchor hatch, according to court documents obtained by The Washington Times. The smuggler then showed Chavez-Guevara where he could hide during the trip to Savannah. Fortunately, the crew discovered him, contacted ICE and its agents nabbed him. (By the way, he had been previously deported.)
“There is zero tolerance for those who break the law to get here, and they don’t get extra points for persistence or creativity,” said U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine. He led that successful prosecution and is headquartered in both Savannah and Augusta.
Consider the numbers as to why Georgia is a leader in the nation in prosecutions. In 2016, before Christine was appointed by President Donald Trump, Georgia’s southern district handled just four immigration cases. Over the next two Trump years, though, prosecutions skyrocketed 2,600 percent.
One of those cases involved Eduardo Gonzalez-Frias, arrested for illegal reentry. Consider this Times report:
“Local authorities had charged him with vehicular homicide for driving while drunk, striking a guardrail, flipping his car into the Augusta Canal and leaving a passenger drowned in his car, but they couldn’t definitively prove he was the driver. Gonzalez-Frias skated on the homicide charge and was given a 16-month sentence for vehicle infractions. He pleaded guilty to the illegal reentry charge, was sentenced in May to time served and was ordered deported once another local DUI charge was settled.”
In addition to arresting and deporting illegal aliens like Gonzalez-Frias, ICE– in cooperation with varied state and local authorities– is increasingly going after those responsible for smuggling them. They are also busting up the stash houses that hold them and arresting the drivers who meet them there to sneak them into our country’s interior.
As for prosecutors, they brought 4,297 immigration smuggling cases in fiscal year 2019 — a record outpacing those in the Obama and Bush administrations. The prosecutions still are a fraction of people sneaking across our borders— more than 800,000 in fiscal year 2019. But the Trump administration and many U.S. attorneys have finally made targeting smugglers a top priority.
“These numbers are genuinely impressive,” says Jessica Vaughn of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. “They are not just the result of more cases to prosecute– there have always been more than enough cases, too many, to prosecute. The numbers reflect the decision to make this a real priority, not just a token effort.”
Vaughn concludes: “It’s shocking to see how few smuggling prosecutions there were under the Obama administration, especially considering that is when (the unaccompanied) children crisis started, which was clearly a problem with smuggling. Had they tried to do more against the smugglers, instead of ignoring it and then treating it as some kind of benign humanitarian flow, we might not have seen the problem get so out of hand.”
