How Weak Urban Cooperation With ICE Exposes Rural Areas To Criminal Aliens

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Sheriff Kenny Lemons never expected to deal with MS-13 criminal aliens after taking office 10 years ago in tiny Clay County, Texas, a rural area near the Oklahoma border. But thanks to the surge in Central Americans in recent years and what he believes to be lax cooperation with ICE from some of the larger metro areas in Texas, highway 287 has become a conduit for drugs and gang members passing through his city. The latest case of Douglas Guevera-Medrano, a 20-year-old illegal alien from El Salvador, underscores the problem.

Douglas Guevera-Medrano was caught in Clay County last Monday after a half-day manhunt involving multiple law enforcement agencies attempting to apprehend him. He had numerous outstanding warrants from Dallas County and is now booked in Sheriff Lemons’ Clay County jail on evading, failure to identify, and outstanding charges in other parts of Texas. According to KFDX, Guevera-Medrano has six outstanding charges from Dallas County for criminal mischief and theft, four charges of criminal mischief, theft, and failure to identify from Farmer’s Branch, and charges from Richardson, Texas, for criminal mischief and theft. According to the sheriff, ICE immediately placed a detainer on him.

The question Sheriff Lemons asked in an interview with CR is: “Why did it take this manhunt in my county in order for this threat to be taken off the streets?”

The outstanding warrants stemmed from an arrest in Dallas County last March, Lemons told me. “Once he made bond last year, he was released without an ICE detainer being placed on him. The reason I was upset about it is because the man shouldn’t even have been in Clay County, if that ICE hold would have been placed on him once those charges were done. He should have been detained and held until the charges were completed and deported to El Salvador. This is ridiculous. We could not show any detainer ever being placed on him, and either way, he should never have been out on the streets. He has been in the country illegally since 2014 and is a member of the MS-13 street gang. We know that the neighborhood he grew up in El Salvador was predominantly controlled by MS-13.”

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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