Jim Hayes - a man for all seasons

You probably don’t know the name Jim Hayes. He’s the Regional Field Office Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Southern California. And he takes his job very seriously.

Here are some of the things he has done:

*He did a sweep of all prisoners in custody in LA and Orange Counties. His agents went to every jail and prison and interviewed all foreign-born prisoners. As a result of the sweep they were able to identify and tag for deportation every illegal alien in custody, a total of 423.

*He placed a full time immigration agent in the Costa Mesa City Jail. The program is nearly six months old now. They have determined that roughly 10% of all people booked in the jail are illegal aliens. The agent flags them for deportation as soon as they have served their time in the USA. And Hayes doesn’t care why you were brought in. Even if you were arrested for jaywalking, you are subject to inspection and deportation.

*He is not afraid of “collateral arrests”. This means that if his agents are on an assignment to pick someone up and they encounter another illegal alien in the process, they don’t ignore him, they arrest him! And Hayes doesn’t apologize for doing so! A case in point was a sweep conducted in January. In one case, they were looking for a convicted rapist. The rapist had moved out, but ICE arrested six other people in the house. It turns out that all six were illegal aliens, and four of them had criminal records. In March, ICE went looking for 300 fugitives in San Diego. They only found 62 of them but took 297 other people into custody along the way.

When asked about the process, Robin Baker, the San Diego Director of Detentions and Removals at ICE said: “We can’t look the other way. We did that for too long.” Amen to that.

This is quite a different operation than Chicago where ICE announced that illegals could protest with confidence on May 1, 2006 because their agents promised not to look for anyone deportable in the crowd!

And when agents invaded a fake ID mill in the Little Village neighborhood last month, they went out of their way not to arrest anyone other than the 22 people they were specifically looking for.

Now I ask you, which operation is more likely to deter future illegal entry?