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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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U.S. immigration authorities promised this week that a migrant accused of raping an underage girl at a shelter in Massachusetts would have his day in court, despite officers arresting him before he could get there.
Cory B. Alvarez, a 26-year-old Haitian national, is accused of a sexual assault at an inn-turned-shelter in Rockland in March.
Despite an immigration detainer lodged by ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division in Boston the day he was arrested, the county court released Alvarez on a $500 bond in June.
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The suspect was then arrested by ERO agents on Tuesday, just before he was due in court for a hearing over the alleged rape. Prosecutors have voiced concerns that they will not be able to hold a full trial now that federal immigration authorities have intervened.
"(If he) leaves the state with immigration or ultimately leaves the country it makes it increasingly more difficult for the Commonwealth to have access to him," Massachusetts Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham told NECN.
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Experts who spoke to Newsweek said the case reflects the disorganization and overlapping jurisdictions that make up current immigration policy, with various state, local and federal agencies asserting their authority and often stepping on one another in cases where an illegal immigrant is accused of a serious crime.
Another alleged migrant rape case also made headlines in New York this week, with police saying a woman was assaulted at knife-point by two migrants in Coney Island.
It was not clear Thursday if ICE had stepped in with that case, but it is common for the Department of Homeland Security to intervene when an illegal immigrant commits a violent crime, placing them in detention, pending removal from the U.S., regardless of where their cases are in the court system.
"Immigration enforcement bureaucracy is kind of, for lack of a better word, slow and dumb, and doesn't work well with others," Michael Kagan, Director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic told Newsweek.
"It can just as often interfere with law enforcement as assist, and I think you can see hints of that in the Massachusetts case, with ICE intervening and arresting someone actually preventing a court appearance."
Kagan, who has worked in immigration law for many years, said the Alvarez case is not an anomaly and that defendants can effectively use ICE as their "getaway driver" when prevented from heading to trial because they are in federal immigration detention.
The professor said that if a crime involved two suspects, one a U.S. citizen and another an illegal immigrant, only the former may face trial while the latter is simply deported.
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ICE often shares details of suspects it has arrested, such as if they had broken local or federal laws, and whether they have already been removed from the U.S. at least one time previously, only to reenter and commit another crime.
Kagan argued that this shows the system as it stands does not work, despite seeming to deal with criminals by removing them from the country.
"If someone has committed a very serious violent crime that carries a long prison sentence, then the best way, if you want them to be incarcerated, would be to prosecute them for that crime and to incarcerate them under the law, as you would with a citizen, regardless of immigration or citizenship status," Kagan told Newsweek.
"It's attractive and politicians really love to say, why wasn't this person deported?" he continued. "But if you think someone has committed a really serious criminal offense, I think you'd want them to be prosecuted and dealt with by the criminal justice system the same way we would do for anyone else."
In New York, David Davon-Bonilla, 24 from Nicaragua, who is accused of raping the woman under the Coney Island boardwalk on Sunday, had previously been charged with attacking a woman at a migrant shelter in Brooklyn.
The other suspect, Leovando Moreno, 37 from Mexico, was arrested in New Jersey in 2022 for public lewdness, the New York Times reported.
In the case in Boston, Alvarez had entered the U.S. legally in June of last year, but violated the conditions of his entry. He then allegedly raped the underage girl in March.
Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in Boston arrested him outside his residence in Brockton on Tuesday.
"He will have his day in court and ERO Boston will continue to cooperate with the criminal court system in Massachusetts, but we cannot allow any significant noncitizen threat to the children of our communities to potentially reoffend," ICE said in a press release.
"ERO Boston will continue to prioritize public safety by arresting and removing egregious noncitizen offenders from New England."
Newsweek reached out to ICE on Wednesday for further comment on its actions potentially disrupting criminal proceedings.
So far this fiscal year, which began October 1, 2023, ICE has removed over 15,000 people with criminal convictions and just over 4,000 with pending criminal charges.
"Deporting them is a means of releasing them," Kagan said. "So if you really want someone to be incarcerated then the way to do that is to prosecute them under criminal law for a crime that carries a prison term."
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