After mishandling a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) request related to a gang member, the county aims to streamline the process to make sure a similar error does not happen again.
On May 15, ICE announced the arrest of Nelson Vladimir Amaya-Benitez, 26, in Gaithersburg. According to ICE, he is a validated MS-13 gang member who unlawfully entered the U.S. and was convicted of second-degree malicious burning and rogue and vagabond.
ICE uses immigration detainers to ask jails and prisons to notify ICE before releasing someone, or to hold someone for a certain time so the Department of Homeland Security can take custody under federal law.
In a statement, an ICE official said the agency lodged five detainers for Amaya-Benitez and none were honored — “allowing him to return to the streets and reoffend time and time again.”
“This pattern is unacceptable,” ICE Baltimore Acting Field Office Director Nikita Baker stated. “We strongly encourage our local law enforcement partners to honor our detainers to ensure that dangerous individuals like this are held accountable and removed from our communities to protect the law-abiding residents we serve.”
In a statement Tuesday, County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation Director Ben Stevenson said the county should have notified ICE before Amaya-Benitez’s release.
“We failed to make this notification. We take full responsibility for this error,” Stevenson stated.
During a media briefing Wednesday, County Executive Marc Elrich said the detainer request came in through fax, and due to a mistake, it did not wind up where it was supposed to. He said it was a mistake but clarified that it was not a policy decision to let Amaya-Benitez go.
“Things were not handled properly, and this person did go,” Elrich said. “I will point out that we made a mistake, and we owned the mistake. We did not have a policy that led to this, we had a mistake that led to this.”
“And ICE should understand mistakes, because I recently recall they made a few mistakes,” he added.
When Amaya-Benitez was released, there was a second problem, Elrich said, which was that his rap sheet did not include the offenses that would have caused the county to honor the detainer.
Elrich said, “It would have been nice, when they realized we weren’t going to honor the detainer, if they had pointed out that this person had a criminal history and was on a gang list. Because if they had pointed that out to us, we could have gone back and checked our records” to verify his criminal history.
He emphasized the county has honored detainers when they involve people who “we definitely do not want on the streets of Montgomery County, and we are going to continue to do that.”
The county’s correction and rehabilitation department did an internal review and identified corrective actions, including a streamlined notification process and more oversight.
Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Earl Stoddard said county and ICE leadership met on Friday. The county asked for all requests to come through a single mechanism so there is more transparency on the county’s end about when ICE requests are coming in. And to ensure there are more eyes, “as opposed to a single individual making a mistake that leads to the non-cooperation that we saw in this particular case.”
