DHS Flashback: More Illegal Alien Cops

Jon Luke Evans

On October 18, I examined conflicting claims regarding Radule Bojovic, a Montenegrin national working as a police officer in the Chicago suburb of Hanover Park, Ill., whom DHS claims is a nonimmigrant B-2 overstay and his employers contend has work authorization. Flashback to a similar case involving a Jamaican national whom DHS claims also overstayed his nonimmigrant visa but who nonetheless was employed “as a reserve police officer with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department” in Maine. And then there’s the Congolese national, purportedly also here illegally, who was a corrections officer.

“ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Serving as a Local Police Officer”

Back on July 28, ICE issued a press release headlined “ICE arrests illegal alien serving as a local police officer after attempting to unlawfully purchase firearm in Maine”.

The “illegal alien” in question is identified as Jon Luke Evans, and as per the agency he’s a Jamaican national who was admitted to the United States through Miami International Airport, apparently on a nonimmigrant visa with permission to remain for a week, on September 24, 2023.

Except he apparently never left, and somehow made his way to the Pine Tree State, where he allegedly secured a position working as a reserve police officer with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department (OOBPD).

By my count, there are 21 police officers now working for the OOBPD (including one “school resource officer”), and five support staff, so it sounds like Mayberry transported to the craggy beaches of Maine.

Evans isn’t on the list of current officers, likely because he agreed to voluntarily depart the United States shortly after ICE arrested him “after he unlawfully attempted to purchase a firearm” on July 25.

He ostensibly attempted to buy a firearm “for his employment as a police officer with the” OOBPD, which is a little odd as most police departments issue their own weapons, but in any event, it appears he duly completed the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) paperwork required for the transaction.

As the FBI explains:

When a person tries to buy a firearm, the seller, known as a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL), contacts NICS electronically or by phone. The prospective buyer fills out the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, “ATF”] form, and the FFL relays that information to the NICS. The NICS staff performs a background check on the buyer. That background check verifies the buyer does not have a criminal record or isn’t otherwise ineligible to purchase or own a firearm.

Reading between the lines in the ICE press release, Evans’s NICS check triggered an ATF alert, and ATF agents — and possibly ICE officers — responded and took him into custody.

E-Verify

The case triggered a debate between the OOBPD and DHS, with the local police chief arguing her department used E-Verify to ensure Evans was employment-authorized before he was hired and DHS spokesman Tricia McLaughlin accusing the department of “reckless reliance” on the system without verifying the authenticity of the documents he presented (which the OOBPD in turn claimed it did).

As the Center has explained: “E-Verify is an Internet-based system that allows an employer, using information reported on an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to determine the eligibility of that employee to work in the United States.”

Given that E-Verify is administered by the Social Security Administration and DHS’s own U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), you may think it odd that McLaughlin called an employer’s reliance on the system into question.

But she’s not alone. My colleague George Fishman (who drafted E-Verify’s implementing statutory text as a staffer nearly 30 years ago and is a fan), explained in an early August op-ed how the system could be subverted through identity theft, and offered proposals for Congress to fix those flaws in the system.

To date, Congress hasn’t taken Fishman up on the offer, but government shutdowns can slow down legislative business.

“In a Very Similar Case in April”

ICE’s press release on Evans’s arrest continued:

In a very similar case in April, ICE officers in Falmouth arrested Gratien Milandou Wamba, an illegally present, 32-year-old citizen of Congo, who was working as a corrections officer. Officers with ICE Boston’s Scarborough, Maine sub office arrested Milandou Wamba for immigration violations after he allegedly illegally attempted to purchase a firearm.

Local reporting indicates Wamba was arrested after he, too, overstayed a nonimmigrant admission he entered on in May 2023, but his attorney claimed he was applying for asylum; if true, he could also have sought work authorization.

In my October 18 analysis of Bojovic’s case, I explained how — through a loophole in the federal criminal laws governing firearms — certain work-authorized aliens employed in law enforcement are permitted to possess firearms issued to them by their state and local agencies in the line of duty.

If everything ICE says is correct, however, Evans and Wamba were trying to purchase their own guns, and in the latter’s case especially that’s extremely unusual in my experience.

One thing I learned having spent eight years working as an immigration judge in a county prison, and eight more years conducting oversight of immigration detention, is that corrections officers don’t carry guns in the normal course of their duties (most facilities keep their firearms locked in armories), for good reason: A prisoner or detainee could seize a weapon in an escape attempt or to trigger a riot.

To be clear, based on my reading of the federal criminal statutes, while there are instances when it’s not illegal for a work-authorized alien without lawful status to possess a government-issued firearm, it’s still a crime for them to purchase and possess their own guns.

If I’m correct, ICE may want to underscore that point in all of these cases, because that loophole (in my opinion) is so stupid that it’s confusing to reasonable and logical folk.

“The Complicated Logistics of Illegal Immigration”

On October 17, The Washington Stand — the news outlet of the Family Research Council — published an article by Joshua Arnold headlined “The Curious Case of Radule Bojovic and the Complicated Logistics of Illegal Immigration”.

As Arnold noted:

Assuming both DHS and Hanover Park got their facts right, there must be more to [Bojovic’s] story that is not publicly known. Something happened in the intervening 10 years to enable a visa overstayer to obtain work authorization. … Did the Biden administration ignore his lack of qualification and grant him a work authorization card anyways?

I think that Arnold’s on to something that ties all three of these cases together. Let me explain.

At the same time Border Patrol agents at the behest of the Biden administration were releasing millions of illegal migrants at the Southwest border, and CBP officers at the ports were waving millions of others through the ports of entry (all in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “INA”), ICE officers were also forced to “deprioritize” millions of other aliens for investigation, arrest, and removal.

That included hundreds of thousands (or more) nonimmigrant overstays, and the continued presence of all those aliens imposed crushing fiscal costs on states and localities — Democrat-led cities in particular.

Because those aliens couldn’t legally work, the cities they were living in were on the hook to house, feed, clothe, educate, and provide medical care to them, and while Biden could (and did) ignore congressional GOP complaints about his immigration policies, his fellow Democrats were a different issue.

In response, USCIS prioritized issuance of work permits for aliens who didn’t have them to the detriment of aliens seeking to enter properly, including nearly 2.9 million aliens Biden’s DHS had paroled and 700,000-plus Venezuelan nationals.

At the same time, several localities apparently decided it was “good public policy” to hire aliens who were removable from the United States because they lacked status but who nonetheless had work authorization for their law-enforcement agencies.

Thanks to that loophole in the federal firearms statutes, it was permissible for local PDs to make such aliens full-fledged, badge-wearing, gun-carrying law-enforcement officers even though their presence in this country — technically or otherwise — violated federal law.

The legislative branch has “plenary power” over immigration, and can thus impose restrictions on aliens that would be impermissible for it to apply to citizens (and in some instances green card holders).

Does Congress want aliens here in temporary status, or with no status, to be vested with authority to enforce local, state, and federal laws and to carry firearms in the course of such service? If so, members may want to explain that to their constituents. If not, they have the power to simplify the “complicated logistics of illegal immigration”.