ICE Boston arrests convicted Romanian murderer, alleged Guatemalan child rapist
Two bad guys, one a convicted murderer and another charged with child rape, are off Massachusetts streets and in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody following separate arrests last week.
The first to be picked up was a 35-year-old Guatemalan national who was arraigned on a charge of statutory rape of a child, as well as a charge of intimidation, in Worcester District Court on Oct. 20. Boston-based agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations lodged a detainer with the court that day but he was released into the community.
ERO arrested him without incident on Nov. 29 in Worcester. His charges in the district court remain pending.
“Once again, the ERO Boston team was able to successfully locate and (apprehend) an unlawfully present individual who faces very serious felony charges,” said Todd Lyons, the Boston field office ERO director.
On Dec. 1, ERO arrested a Romanian man in Watertown who was convicted of murder in his home country in 2010, but authorities say that the globe-trotting criminal’s record is much longer than that, featuring a slew of convictions and charges dating back at least to 2004.
That’s the year he was convicted on a charge of bodily harm in his home country, according to the ERO. He also has theft- and fraud-related convictions and charges in France, Latvia and here in the U.S., where his charges include theft and armed robbery.
ERO Boston received word the Romanian was in the commonwealth, they say, after he became the focus of an investigation launched by local authorities into a series of larceny scams across the commonwealth.
ERO arrested 46,396 noncitizens with criminal histories — either charged or convicted — in fiscal year 2022, according to the agency. Those include 1,501 homicie-related offenses; 1,114 kidnapping offenses; 8,164 sex and sexual assault offenses; 21, 531 assault offenses and 5,554 weapons offenses.
At any given time, there are tens of thousands of ICE detainees in the country, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, database maintained by Syracuse University in New York, which tracks immigration court numbers. On Nov. 19, which is the last available date on their records, there were 39,013 detainees held by either ICE itself — 10,098 detainees — or U.S. Customs and Border Protection — 28,915 detainees.