U.S. law officers arrest dozens of foreign ex-cons in Los Angeles

In spite of city government officials in Los Angeles, Calif., insisting on maintaining a so-called "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported on Monday that its law enforcement agents arrested 37 foreigners with prior convictions for sex offenses during a three-day dragnet in the City of Angels and the surrounding counties.

ICE detained about 429,000 foreign nationals and removed 188,000 known criminal aliens from the United States in 2011, an all-time high, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics Annual Report. However, a number of knowledgeable people working in government and in law enforcement have said they are suspicious of statistics released by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Director of ICE John Morton. During these latest raids that ended late Friday night, a special police task force nabbed the deportable alien sex offenders in four Southland counties -- 16 in Los Angeles County, four in Orange County, 11 in Ventura County and six in San Bernardino County. While the arrested were mostly Mexican citizens, the group also had nationals of eight other countries -- El Salvador, Honduras, Vietnam, Armenia, Trinidad, the Philippines, Nicaragua and Guatemala, said ICE officials.

---

"This operation was designed to target and arrest criminal aliens who have been convicted of sex crimes," said Timothy Robbins, an ICE field office director. "We will all be able to rest easier knowing that these dangerous criminals are off our streets and will soon be out of the United States," he added. The arrests were coordinated with the ICE's National Fugitive Operations Program designed to investigate, locate, arrest and remove at-large criminal aliens and immigration fugitives. Meanwhile, on Monday, ICE agents in Chicago, Ill., reported that 31 convicted criminal aliens, immigration fugitives and immigration violators were arrested during a two-day operation. Of the 31 arrested, 22 had prior convictions for crimes such as: battery, aggravated drunken driving, drug possession, child molestation, sexual misconduct and theft. Fifteen are immigration fugitives who had been previously ordered to leave the country but failed to depart; four others had been previously deported and illegally re-entered the United States, which is a felony. As with Los Angeles, Chicago government officials consider their city a "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens and federal agents do not expect nor receive local police assistance.