U.S. immigration authorities boost efforts to hunt war criminals

The U.S. government — Immigration and Customs Enforcement in particular — steps up efforts to find, prosecute and deport people accused of human rights violations who try to hide here.
October 23, 2011|By Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times
When Carlos de Graca Lopes took over as director of Sao Martinho Prison in Cape Verde in 2001, he arrived with a warning for inmates: He had one hand made of velvet and another made of iron. Grab the velvet hand and be rewarded. Grab the iron hand and face the consequences.
Over the next five years, Lopes ruled with his iron hand, according to a government indictment filed against him in Cape Verde. More than 150 times, the indictment alleges, he ordered or executed the beating and torture of prisoners, including spraying them in the face with water so they could not breathe and handcuffing them to an iron bar for weeks.

In 2006, despite a government order that Lopes remain in the island country off Africa's Atlantic coast while under investigation, he was granted a tourist visa to the United States, where he quickly disappeared.
There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of people like Lopes in the U.S., alleged human rights and war crimes violators who managed to emigrate to this country, often with legal authorization. Although federal immigration officials have long sought to find and deport such offenders, efforts to prevent their entry and punish violators has grown in the last few years.
In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, made up of historians, investigators and legal experts whose job it is to identify and track human rights violators and war criminals around the world.
Their work has led to several high-profile arrests, among them a Moreno Valley martial arts instructor and a Santa Ana maintenance man who are accused of massacring at least 160 men, women and children during the Guatemalan civil war; a Georgia man who was allegedly part of a Serbian paramilitary group that killed thousands during the Bosnian war; and a Chicago-area grocery store worker wanted in Rwanda on charges of genocide and war crimes.
Nearly 10 years ago, Amnesty International issued a report calling the U.S. a haven for torturers and identifying more than 1,000 suspected human rights violators living in the country. At the time, federal officials invested little in resources to track them down, the rights group said. But Homeland Security and Justice Department officials, who for years had focused on deporting Nazi war criminals, were looking to expand their efforts to include alleged offenders from Central America, Bosnia, Rwanda and other countries.
Over the next few years, arrests mounted and the Justice Department launched its own unit with a similar objective to ICE's war crimes center.
"As we began to be successful, we got more resources, more bodies," said ICE Unit Chief Tom Annello. "We went from being just a program that had oversight over this to one that was more proactive and engaged."
The ICE center now has about 28 full-time employees, including attorneys, researchers and analysts. They use declassified U.S. government documents and other data to identify possible culprits. The compiled names, which so far include more than 3,000 people suspected of human rights violations, are then shared with U.S. agents and officials tasked with approving visas.
Vienna Colucci, a senior policy advisor at Amnesty International who worked on the 2002 report, said that the U.S. has made progress but that dealing with the problem through immigration "isn't ideal." Preventing a person from entering the country or deporting them without handing them over to a court, "doesn't help to stop atrocities," she said. "You're sending back somene who is a severe abuser to those countries where they were committing those crimes."
The U.S., she said, needs to be more willing to use criminal prosecution at home.
Over the years, Congress has adopted laws aimed at allowing the prosecution of torture and human rights abuses committed abroad, a move applauded by human rights groups.
But the laws cover only atrocities committed after the laws were adopted, or sometimes only apply to U.S. citizens or members of the military. So far only one person, Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, has been successfully prosecuted. Taylor was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 97 years in federal prison.
More often, officials said, they settle for lesser charges that can later result in deportation.
"We'll go after them for visa fraud, perjury, jaywalking. We don't care," Annello said.
Even minor charges can require extensive investigation, often including traveling to the alleged violator's home country, interviewing witnesses and gathering documents to present in court.
Special Agent Brian Andersen, who worked on the Lopes case, has traveled to Rwanda, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa to investigate alleged war crimes. Andersen, a onetime social studies teacher who got into law enforcement in the late 1990s, said he's been deeply moved by the work.
"These are, in my opinion, some of the most important cases that I have ever worked or that I will ever work," he said.
Since 2004, ICE has arrested more than 200 people for human rights violations and deported more than 400, ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said. The agency is pursuing more than 1,900 cases involving suspects from about 95 countries.
After arriving in the U.S., Lopes went to the one place where he stood a chance of going undetected — Brockton, Mass., a city near Boston that has a Cape Verdean community of about 10,000 people.
The father of seven found an apartment with other migrants and got a job at a temp agency. Immigration agents began tracking him after getting a tip from the FBI in Senegal. About a year after Lopes arrived, authorities found him making frozen pizzas for grocery stores.
Agents didn't tell him what they knew about the charges he faced back home, according to a person familiar with the case. Instead, they took him in for overstaying his visa and waited to see what he would do.
Rather than accept deportation, Lopes submitted an application for asylum, according to court records.
On his application, he wrote, "I have never been formally charged with any crimes," according to a federal indictment. He testified to the same before an immigration judge.
Because of these and other answers he gave, Lopes now faced criminal charges in the U.S. for fraud, misuse of a visa and perjury. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
"In this sentence that I'm imposing on you," wrote U.S. District Court Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf, "it is important to try to send the message that those being investigated and accused of violating human rights should resist the understandable temptation to act illegally to come and stay in the United States."
Lopes, 49, completed his prison term last year and was returned to Cape Verde in September 2010.
He is being detained at a military base while he awaits trial. In a telephone interview, he said he was a lifelong military man who was assigned to direct prisons because of his exemplary record. He said the charges against him were conjured by political opponents.
Lopes said he didn't come to the U.S. to flee justice but because his two youngest sons needed surgery and he was waiting for their mother to bring them to the country. In the U.S., he said, he was sentenced harshly because of crimes he was only accused of in Cape Verde.
He recalled being housed in solitary confinement in an "aluminum box" with no air conditioning before he was transferred from New York to federal prison in Arizona.
"They kept me there for 30 days — it was the worst time of my life," he said. "American justice was not just with me."
When his case is tried in Cape Verde, he said, his name will be cleared.
paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

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