900 nabbed in California on immigration charges

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/05/24/BAGJ10S63K.DTL
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Saturday, May 24, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
900 nabbed in state on immigration charges
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer


Federal immigration officers arrested more than 900 people in
California
on immigration violations this month, almost half of them in Northern
California, officials said Friday.

Fugitive operations teams with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
made 441 arrests in the northern part of the state. Of those, 178 were
targeted individuals who had either ignored final orders of deportation or
who returned to the United States illegally after being deported. The
other 263 were people encountered in the course of making the arrests who
did not have legal authorization to be in the country, ICE officials said.
Roughly 1 in 5 of the people arrested had felony or misdemeanor
criminal
convictions, according to the agency. They included a 31-year-old
Sacramento man with a record of transporting and selling heroin and a
41-year-old man from Watsonville with convictions for spousal rape and
burglary. Both men had been previously deported and had returned to the
United States.

Among those arrested in the Bay Area were 17 people in San Rafael taken
into custody at their homes early Thursday, of whom four were targeted by
immigration officials, said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

The San Rafael arrests sent fear through Mexican and Central American
communities, which include many undocumented immigrants. Three San Rafael
schools reported scores of student absences Thursday, including San Pedro
Elementary School, which canceled its open house Thursday night because
families were afraid to attend, district officials said.

San Pedro's principal, Kathryn Gibney, had testified before
Congress two
days earlier at a hearing on the emotional impact of immigration raids on
children.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, who chaired the hearing, contacted
senior
ICE officials Friday to express concern over the raids and suggest that
current voluntary humanitarian guidelines covering workplace immigration
raids should be mandatory for all ICE actions.

Kice emphasized that ICE did not make any arrests at schools.
"Our goal in making all these arrests is to involve as few third
parties
as possible," she said. "That's one reason we endeavor to make these
arrests at residences."

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@....

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