DARLINGTON — Two foreign nationals arrested in Darlington last year by U.S. immigration enforcement agents have been sentenced in federal court for illegally re-entering the country after deportation.
Darlington Police Chief Jason King said such arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are “pretty rare.”
His department has done “a ton of work with the Hispanic population” in the city to build trust and counter fears of a mass ICE crackdown under the current presidential administration.
Such fears are unfounded, he said.
“I’ve never seen an otherwise law-abiding member of our community picked up by ICE for anything,” King said. “If they’ve been deported before, those people are on (ICE’s) radar.”
Both ICE arrests in Darlington in 2018 were of men previously deported out of the United States.
Carlos Alberto Utrera-Utrera, 29, a citizen of Mexico, was arrested by ICE at his home on Ohio Street in Darlington on March 11.
Federal court records show Utrera-Utrera was convicted of similar immigration-related offenses in New Mexico in 2014 and Arizona in 2015
Wisconsin state court records show a couple of traffic offenses for him but no criminal convictions.
He entered a plea deal Aug. 8 in federal court in Madison and was sentenced to prison for one year and one day, with the court recommending he “be afforded prerelease placement in a residential reentry center with work release privileges.”
His attorney, Payal Khandhar, asked for a 150-day sentence, with time served, arguing that “his behavior in this country has been otherwise lawful.”
She wrote in a letter to the judge, dated Aug. 3, that “if not for his sense of familial obligation, Mr. Utrera-Utrera would have never illegally entered the United States.” She wrote that he is now planning to stay in Mexico permanently because of changes in his family’s financial situation as well as the increased cost of crossing the border.
According to Khandhar, Utrera-Utrera was forced to take a significant role in providing for his family at a young age after his father left home. He stopped going to school at age 6. The father eventually returned, but with debilitating health issues that left him unable to work. Utrera-Utrera’s options for employment in Mexico were limited to working in farm fields or driving cabs, but farm work didn’t pay enough to support his family and driving a cab required owning or renting a car, which he couldn’t afford.
“Mr. Utrera-Utrera had no friends or family in the United States when he entered and no other incentive to enter other than to provide for his family,” Khandhar wrote.
But since Utrera-Utrera’s last entry into the U.S., his father won the lottery in Mexico, and “although the sum of money was not enough to provide for the family indefinitely, it was enough for his father to purchase three vehicles” and support the family by renting them out to cab drivers.
“This reduces Mr. Utrera-Utrera’s financial obligations to just himself and his two young children,” and therefore “he no longer has a need to return to the United States,” Khandhar wrote.
In addition, “Mr. Utrera-Utrera relates that the expense of trying to enter the United States illegally is no longer worth the benefits of being employed in this country, (and) with the current administration the risk of entering this country has increased dramatically,” she wrote, noting that along with this perceived heightened risk comes a higher requested cost for transportation across the border.
At the time of Utrera-Utrera’s sentencing, Khandhar wrote that her client had arranged to permanently reside in Mexico and had completed paperwork for his U.S.-born son to visit Mexico regularly while continuing to stay in the U.S. with his mother, an immigrant with a work visa who plans to return to Mexico after it expires.
The other person arrested by ICE in Darlington in 2018 was Jorge Neplaly Carias-Vindel, 44, a citizen of Honduras. ICE agents arrested him Aug. 23 at the Lafayette County Courthouse. He was a resident of Fitchburg at the time, according to court records.
Carias-Vindel entered a plea deal and was sentenced Feb. 7 to time served, after spending about five and a half months in custody in Wisconsin. He faced a maximum penalty of two years in federal prison.
His attorney, Associate Federal Defender Peter Moyers, argued for the time-served sentence because Carias-Vindel’s criminal history “shows a de-escalation.”
“Unlike many illegal-reentry defendants, Carias-Vindel did not arrive in federal court after a state arrest for a violent, or even especially dangerous, criminal episode. Instead, ICE arrested him at the Lafayette County Courthouse, where he was responding to a summons in a traffic-violations case,” Moyers wrote in a brief to U.S. District Judge William Conley.
Carias-Vindel’s criminal record in Wisconsin includes misdemeanor convictions of battery and cocaine possession, but little activity in the past decade.
“Unsurprisingly, since he began drinking less in 2010-11, his law enforcement contacts have decreased in both frequency and gravity,” Moyers wrote.
King said his department had no direct involvement in the arrest of Carias-Vindel or Utrera-Utrera. He said he is unaware of any other ICE arrests in the city last year.
ICE agents typically “let us know if they’re coming to town,” but immigration enforcement is “not something a local police department has the authority over” or the resources to pursue, King said.
Local authorities do notify ICE “if we come into contact with someone who has committed a crime and we learn that they don’t have proper documentation,” but otherwise law-abiding immigrants have little to fear.
“From my perspective, I don’t see (ICE) hassling our local immigrants unless they’ve done something to draw attention to themselves,” he said.
The Darlington Police Department has been doing outreach to the local immigrant population for about 20 years. When Donald Trump was elected president, police heard fears from local immigrants that Trump would order “a nationwide roundup,” King said.
“We put out translated notices to the local Latino population just to explain to them that the local police aren’t going to be participating in roundups,” King said.
King said he’s heard criticism from the community of this type of educational outreach but emphasized that it isn’t political, it’s practical.
“If we don’t have the trust of the immigrant community, that’s an entire section of the community that will be lawless,” King said. “It’s actually very dangerous.”
Outreach earns the trust of resident immigrants and makes them more willing to help police and report crime, he said.
“That’s obviously a benefit to our whole community,” King said.