New ICE Chicago field office director: ‘We don’t conduct raids’

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement introduced Robert Guadian as the new head of its deportation forces in the Midwest during a news conference Thursday where he sought to reframe how advocacy groups and lawmakers characterize the agency’s mission to deport unauthorized immigrants.

“We don’t conduct raids,” Guadian told reporters at the agency’s Loop field office. “We conduct targeted arrests.”

In his new role, Guadian will oversee enforcement and removal operations throughout Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky. He previously held leadership positions at ICE’s field offices in Dallas and on the West Coast.

During Thursday’s closed news conference, Guadian went after state and local elected officials for enacting “sanctuary” laws that serve as legal safeguards to prevent local law enforcement agencies from handing over most unauthorized immigrants in their custody to ICE.

Those laws prevented ICE from detaining nearly 1,200 unauthorized immigrants arrested in Cook County last year, Guadian said.

“Most of the arrests that ICE makes nationwide occur at local jails across the country,” he said, leaving the agency with “no choice but to locate and arrest these released criminal aliens and other immigration violators in public places in the community.”

Carlos Ballesteros/Sun-Times

Figures released under federal record requests show many immigrants in ICE custody never stepped foot in jail.

As of December 2018 — the latest data publicly available — 40% of people locked up in ICE facilities across Illinois have no criminal convictions, up from 30% in September 2016, according to an analysis of ICE records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Nationwide, nearly two-thirds of ICE detainees had clean criminal records at the end of last year, the group found.

When a Chicago Sun-Times reporter presented the figures, Guadian and ICE Chicago field office spokeswoman Nicole Alberico declined to comment.

Carlos Ballesteros/Sun-Times

Guadian’s introduction came days after ICE agents detained five workers at Route 66 Pizza on the Southeast Side and two others in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Advocacy groups and elected officials referred to both arrests as “raids,” which Guadian considers a misnomer. Though Guadian suggests the term “targeted arrests,” ICE agents routinely detain immigrants present at the time of a targeted arrest.

Such was the case in May when ICE agents arrested the parents of Paula Hincapie-Rendon — a Lutheran minister and a mechanic from Colombia with clean criminal records — after first pulling her over and then following her to their home in Englewood.

Hincapie-Rendon is protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program but her parents were not authorized to live in the United States. They were deported two weeks later.

Guadian admitted ICE agents regularly pick up other unauthorized immigrants when out for a targeted arrest but said Chicago’s sanctuary laws were to blame.

“Oftentimes when we enter a community for a targeted arrest, there are additional arrests that occur at that point,” Guadian said. “I’d rather be making our arrests at jails and not in the community.”

Carlos Ballesteros/Sun-Times

Speaking outside the ICE Chicago field office after Guadian’s press conference, Mayor Lori Lightfoot — flanked by City Council members and immigrant rights advocates — said the agency was “terrorizing” immigrant communities and reiterated her support for Chicago’s sanctuary laws.

“We’ve been very clear: [ICE is] not having access to any [of the Chicago Police Department’s] databases, and CPD will not cooperate with them on any of their immigration raids,” Lightfoot said. “Of course we know that we hurt their ability to do their job in the city, but so be it. That’s the point.”

Carlos Ballesteros is a corps members of Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster Sun-Times coverage of Chicago’s South Side and West Side.