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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Illegal immigrants arrested at military parachute factory
Fifty-seven illegal immigrants were arrested Tuesday at a worksite in Asheville, N.C., that manufactures parachutes for the U.S. military, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.
The arrests were based on an investigation that revealed that the illegal immigrants had used fraudulent Social Security numbers to obtain employment, ICE said in a press release.
The company “has been fully cooperative” and is not a target of the investigation, ICE said.
The illegal immigrants were from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Honduras.
“Protecting the integrity of our nation’s critical infrastructure is among ICE’s highest priorities,” said Delburt Richburg, assistant special agent-in-charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in Charlotte. “When individuals use fraudulent social security numbers to get jobs, they hide their true identity and history. We need to know who is working on our critical infrastructure sites.”
The press release also said: “Illegal aliens employed at sensitive facilities — such as military bases, nuclear plants, chemical plants, airports and Department of Defense contractors — pose a homeland security threat.”
(Photo by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
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Only three illegal immigrants accept voluntary deportation
Only three illegal immigrants have accepted an offer from the U.S. government to turn themselves in without threat of arrest, the Washington Post reported this week.
The offer was part of a pilot program which targeted 457,000 illegal immigrants.
“The cold reception given to the rollout of the three-week pilot self-deportation program, called Scheduled Departure, presents an apt metaphor for the state of relations between U.S. enforcement officials and immigrant advocates in the year since Congress killed President Bush’s proposed overhaul,” the Post said.
Read the story here.
