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Another big black mark for the profession. None of the legal and proper ways to perform the work that I told this reporter got into the article. It appears she was more interested in painting every recovery and bail agent as law breakers also.
From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly 2007-01-31
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bounty Hunted
A man who pursued illegal immigrants for deportation found himself handcuffed by the feds and accused of impersonating a federal agent
By Eliza Strickland
Last spring, Eugene Kesselman was fighting his estranged wife for custody of their son, and as the case dragged on, his bitterness mounted. As spring turned to early summer, he had a brilliant notion. His wife, Kateryna Terets, was an immigrant from Ukraine who had ignored a final deportation order issued in 2002. If he could get her deported, surely all his problems would disappear.
He first called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for deportations, and offered to set up his erstwhile lifemate so that the agency could take her into custody. Apparently, he got nowhere.
So he made another phone call. Soon he was talking to Jeremy Brickner, a bounty hunter who made his living pursuing illegal immigrants and delivering them to ICE for deportation. He was one of a select few hired by bond agencies to find aliens with final deportation orders, people released on "immigration bonds." According to Brickner's records, he delivered 112 aliens to la migra's doorstep in the last three years.
Brickner took Kesselman's case.
Kesselman lured Terets and her 11-year-old daughter to his parents' nondescript apartment deep in the Richmond, offering her a chance to visit their son. When she walked into the room, Brickner slapped handcuffs on her wrists, and flashed a copy of her deportation order. He drove Terets and her daughter to a Hilton Garden Inn in South San Francisco, where he held them overnight in a hotel room. The next morning, he dropped them off at ICE's office on Sansome Street, and walked away. It was just another bounty.
But according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, Brickner took too many liberties with the law. In December, the attorney's office charged him with two counts of impersonating a federal agent, alleging he represented himself as "Immigration" when he handcuffed Terets, and again when he picked up a man in San Jose. ICE may be grateful for the other 110 aliens he picked up for them, but now the agency appears to have turned, bringing the full fury of the federal government down on him.
Bounty hunters are known for their excessive bravado and their evident delight in acting like cops with a little extra leeway — bullying, cajoling, and lying to get the information they need. The country's law enforcement system depends on them to do their dirty work quietly and then to deliver the goods — but if they become an embarrassment, their questionable tactics leave them vulnerable to government crackdowns. Even Dog the Bounty Hunter, the mulleted star of an A&E reality show, got in trouble with the law this fall; Dog is facing kidnapping charges for arresting a fugitive in Mexico where bounty hunting is outlawed.
Now the law has come for Brickner, who is currently out on $100,000 bail and awaiting trial. He maintains his innocence and says he doesn't feel guilty about anything he has done in his career. Brickner also says that all bounty hunters work in the gray area of the law. He thinks the government is trying to make an example out of him, perhaps to scare bounty hunters into better behavior, or to drive them out of the immigration business entirely.
Illegal-immigrant bounty hunting is such an obscure field, immigrant advocacy groups don't even know to be outraged about it. "I don't know anything about bounty hunters — other than seeing them on bad TV," says Kat Rodriguez of the Coalition for Human Rights, which tracks vigilante groups active on the Mexico border. It seems that ICE (the agency that replaced the INS when Homeland Security was formed) would prefer to keep it that way.
Too bad for them. Brickner's case opens a window into this strange world, where law-bending deputies help an outnumbered and under-funded government agency do its job. It also offers a glimpse of how Homeland Security quietly lets private citizens go to extraordinary lengths to reduce the number of illegal immigrants who ignore their deportation orders.
In public, however, ICE is trying to disown Brickner's entire profession. Asked about the agency's relationship to bounty hunters, a spokeswoman says delicately, "I don't think we want to go there."
Thirty-year-old Brickner is not a physically imposing man. He stands about 6 feet, with a lean frame and quick movements to match his nimble brain. But he has a nice smile and engaging manner that probably take him farther than a punch in the jaw. He's talkative and funny and charismatic, the kind of guy whom you'd like to help out if he asked for a favor. He'd make a good con man. His colleagues say he was a great bounty hunter.
Seven years ago, Brickner's most hair-raising experience was supervising a rowdy high school Spanish class. The former substitute teacher started bounty hunting as a hobby, he says, tracking down criminals who had skipped bail when he wasn't teaching school. It wasn't as strange a jump as it sounds — he had studied criminal justice in college at Sacramento State. He had started college with a "redneck, closed-minded, 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' mentality," he says, but came out with a more sophisticated understanding of the system, and how it could be played.
Tony "The Tiger" Lopez, a former lightweight boxing champ and a bail bondsman in Sacramento, gave Brickner his start in the bounty hunting biz. Brickner soon began to relish the chase — the tricks that brought him closer to his quarry, and the adrenaline rush of the capture. "It's fun!" he says. "It's like hide-and-seek for adults."
Lopez taught him one of the basic rules: All bounty hunters lie to get the information they need, although some politely call it "pretexting." Criminals aren't constrained by ethical niceties, says Lopez, so those chasing the criminals can't be, either. "I'll tell you right now, I lie like a rug dealer to get somebody into custody," he says.
The State Farm ruse is an old dependable. A relative has died and there's a plump life insurance check waiting for the bail jumper; the only catch is that the check has to be delivered by hand. Brickner also learned that he could call the bail jumper's credit card company and act concerned about a possible identity theft, then ask for the locations where the card has been recently used. Or he could get access to medical records and call up the bail jumper's doctor, asking for the date of his next appointment.
It's tacitly understood that some bounty hunters take the extra step and assume the identity of a police officer or federal agent to make a catch. "Sometimes you got to do what you got to do," says Lopez, adding that he's speaking not for himself, but for the profession in general. "You go into some of these places — the kids are screaming, the women are screaming, and the guy is holed up in a bedroom upstairs with a gun. You call [the local police] for some backup, and they say, 'Sorry, we don't have anybody to send out to you right now.' And it's your $25,000 bond up there in that bedroom, and you've got to go get it." He adds, "They should let us have our leeway and do our jobs."
Brickner became the go-to guy for immigration bonds in 2003 when he began contracting with Fairmont Specialty, a Texas insurance company with a division that insures bond agents. The company paid him a flat $1,000 for most immigrant pickups. Hunting immigrants who are by definition undocumented brings special challenges. "There is no information," says Brickner. "You're chasing a phantom, an alien — someone with no ID, nothing." It also brings distinct moral conundrums. Quite often, the immigrants who Brickner went after hadn't committed any crime other than sneaking into the country or overstaying a tourist visa in search of a better life. Brickner was the knock on the door they were dreading.
"Every time I turn somebody in, I ruin probably a dozen people's lives," he says calmly, adding that he has come to terms with his job. The people whom Brickner rounded up were usually those who challenged their deportation in court, thus buying themselves a few years in the United States. Brickner just happened to be what they encountered at the end of the line. "Their due process is over," he says. "They've got the choice of how to do it. These folks are sent a letter — they can either turn themselves in, or wait for me to come and get them."
In the three years that Brickner worked the immigration bond beat, he was stabbed with a screwdriver in Sacramento, hit with a hammer in Miami, and "pummeled endlessly" in Anaheim by members of the Salvadoran gang M-13. He mostly hunted illegal immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Not many Mexicans get out on immigration bonds; ICE either deports them quickly, or the immigrant decides not to gather the money for a legal challenge and the bond, knowing that it's cheaper to get deported and then pay a coyote to help with a new crossing.
Despite what you might expect, Brickner's work wasn't fueled by nativist rage, and he's not a right-winger who thinks the illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs. He was raised in "white-trash, non-cultural" Redding, Calif., but says he's grateful that his job has opened his eyes, and given him a new appreciation for other cultures and lifestyles. He has zero sympathy for vigilante groups like the Minutemen that roam the U.S. borders, looking for illegals, and wonders if their extreme tactics have made the government keep a closer watch on bounty hunters, too.
This is not the first time that Brickner has been accused of putting on airs of police authority. The affidavit that ICE prepared spells out the details of a previous incident in July 2005. According to the affidavit, Brickner was chasing an immigrant on I-15 near San Bernardino when a Highway Patrol officer got a call saying that an unmarked car was using a flashing red-and-blue light. The light wasn't on the car's roof when the officer pulled Brickner over, but it was inside. The officer also found two fully loaded Glocks, a police baton, a taser, two sets of handcuffs, and two official-looking badges, one emblazoned with the words: "ICE Warrant Detail Agent #2456."
Brickner was charged with six counts, including the unlawful use of a badge, misuse of red warning lights, and several charges relating to gun possession.
But that's not the whole story, Brickner maintains. A few weeks later, when he was out on bail, he went back to work on the case. He called up the immigrant and said he had to get some court paperwork and some money to him, and the man told him to stop by the house. Brickner asked the man to help him find the house by waiting outside on the sidewalk and flagging him down.
Brickner called the local ICE office and asked if they would pick up the immigrant instead, to avoid the possibility of further legal entanglements. Brickner told the ICE agents to follow his car, and to look for a man waving them down, as if asking to be arrested. Brickner remembers their amazement. "How do you get them to do that?" they asked.
The district attorney ended up dropping five of the charges against Brickner. He pled no contest to the misdemeanor of carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle, but felt he had come out OK in the end. The immigrant was in custody, and he wasn't.
Officially, ICE doesn't approve of the bounty hunting profession.
Charles DeMore, ICE's special agent in charge of investigations in San Francisco, says that each time a bounty hunter cuts a few corners to get his man, it makes ICE's work that much harder. "It terrorizes the [immigrant] community. They're afraid to deal with anyone — they're fearful that if they're contacted by someone who represents themselves as a federal agent, that they may not be."
DeMore also worries that bounty hunters don't have the proper respect for an immigrant's rights. ICE must abide by strict regulations when the agency detains immigrants; there are no federal guidelines governing the behavior of illegal-immigrant bounty hunters. While that seems to leave a lot of wiggle room in how they operate, DeMore says ICE has an obligation to stop bounty hunters who say they're working in the "gray area" of the law. "My feeling is, that means they're operating unlawfully, they're violating federal statutes that we have the authority to enforce," he says.
Yet ICE has admitted that its resources are "woefully inadequate" for the task of catching all the immigrants who abscond. ICE estimates that there are currently more than 590,000 immigrants in the United States who have ignored their final deportation orders — and that number is increasing by more than 40,000 people each year. A report issued by Homeland Security's inspector general last April states that based on past experience, 62 percent of aliens who are released will later ignore their final deportation orders and stay in the country. (Other reports have placed the number as high as 85 percent.)
Currently, however, ICE has little choice — its resources are stretched too thin to hold or quickly deport all the immigrants who get detained. The agency's reports bemoan the lack of personnel and bed space, and the expense of holding immigrants in custody for the duration of their legal proceedings.
The agency also lacks the manpower to round up those who run. ICE recently beefed up its number of "fugitive operations" teams; by the end of 2006 there were 52 teams, up from a paltry 18 the year before. The fugitive ops teams look primarily for illegal immigrants with criminal records, but even those people often slip away. According to the inspector general's report, which was highly critical of ICE's deportation results, the lack of resources has led to a "mini-amnesty program for criminal and other high-risk aliens."
ICE is in the midst of a major push to improve their detention and removal operations, and the beefed-up fugitive ops teams have been making conspicuous raids across the country, under the name "Operation Return to Sender." Two weeks ago, the teams brought the sweep to Los Angeles, picking up more than 750 illegal immigrants, and ICE brags that the nationwide crackdown has resulted in 13,192 arrests since last May. However, those figures don't seem like much of a dent in the problem.
Brickner doesn't have a high opinion of ICE's fugitive ops teams. "Proportionately, we pick up more than immigration does," he says. "Because we don't have their guidelines and things like that, and we have other resources available to us. We don't need warrants to find information, you know."
Less than two years ago, Congress considered embracing Brickner's profession, and almost deputized illegal-immigrant bounty hunters to augment ICE's strength. A congressman tried to slip a provision into the REAL ID Act, a controversial law most discussed for setting federal standards that prevent illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses.
The new law would have given bounty hunters "the absolute right to locate, apprehend, arrest, detain and surrender" any bonded-out immigrant, anywhere in the country, at any time, if the hunter decided the immigrant was a flight risk. It would have established Homeland Security "turn-in centers" across the country, where immigrants could be dropped off 24 hours a day. Finally, it would have required that federal, state, and local governments provide complete access, free of charge, to any information they had that might help the bounty hunter recover the fugitive.
The bill made it out of the House with the bounty hunter provisions intact, but they were stripped away before the president signed it in May 2005. The Congressional Black Caucus had reacted with outrage to the language, saying that it brought to mind the antebellum laws that allowed the hunting of fugitive slaves.
On Jan. 10 Brickner had his first day in San Francisco's federal court for an uneventful status conference. He looked young and nervous, wearing a black suit that hung loosely on his slim frame.
Although the federal government has no laws specifically governing bounty hunters who round up the immigrants, ICE seems to have plenty of books to throw at Brickner. Based on ICE's search of his house, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento arraigned him on an additional charge in mid-January: felon in possession of a handgun. (He picked up the felony in New York City, in 2005, when the airport police found a gun and hollow-point bullets in his luggage.) Brickner is worried that the attorneys will keep piling on the charges. He says that his public defender warned him that the prosecution is carefully picking over the material they found at his house, like the 18 photocopies of federal forms that bear the official seal of Homeland Security. Apparently, it's a federal felony to reproduce anything with the symbol of a government agency on it.
Had Brickner not picked up Kateryna Terets and her daughter in that Richmond apartment, it seems clear that ICE would still be turning a blind eye as Brickner made as many photocopies as he pleased. However, Brickner committed the ultimate sin: He ditched his status as a contractor working with a bond company and branched out on his own, a deportation entrepreneur. He got a check from a private citizen to do the deed (although he claims the check later bounced).
ICE's search warrant affidavit narrates the events of Terets' pickup on May 11, calling attention to those facts that the government finds egregious, now that it's paying attention. It's a recitation of small details that add up to a felony charge, which carries the possibility of up to three years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Brickner did not commit a crime simply by detaining Terets and her daughter. In fact, he claims he checked with ICE before going after the woman, as he did with every case. "Two deportation officers said, 'Yes, bring them in, they were supposed to be deported,'" he remembers.
The charge hinges on whether or not he identified himself as a federal agent while he slapped on the handcuffs. The government alleges that when Brickner confronted Terets, he claimed to be from "Immigration." Brickner hotly denies the accusation. He adds that he wasn't wearing any type of uniform; after a previous warning from ICE in 2005, he stopped wearing the T-shirt with "Immigration Warrant Agent" printed on the back. When he picked up Terets, he says, he was in street clothes and wearing pink Converse sneakers.
According to the affidavit, Brickner's next offense occurred while he and another bounty hunter were in the car with Terets and her daughter, en route to the hotel. Brickner handed Terets a promotional pen that said "ICE Warrant Detail" on it. ICE Warrant Detail is indeed the name of Brickner's registered business, according to the Sacramento County Web site. With this business name, he apparently did break the law: It's a federal crime for a private business to use language that conveys the impression that it's a government agency.
But Brickner would have plenty of company if the feds decided to systematically enforce this law. "United States of America Fugitive Recovery Agency," a high-profile bounty hunting company in Miami, is just one example among dozens. Shadowy Web sites without contact information cater to those who flout the law, offering such wares as fake Department of Homeland Security badges, lapel pins, and polo shirts. You can get an "ICE Special Agent" hat for $10.
It is not a crime, and not at all unusual, for a bounty hunter to hold an immigrant in a hotel room overnight. Brickner says that ICE officials have told him that the agency officially disapproves of prolonged detentions, but acknowledges that there's often no other choice. When Brickner picked up Terets and her daughter, ICE's Sansome Street office had already closed for the day. Other bounty hunters report holding immigrants over the weekend, waiting for an ICE office to open on Monday morning.
The affidavit's narrative ends with a scene at the Hilton Garden Inn in South San Francisco. According to the hotel's reception clerk, Brickner asked if there was a side door he could use, and said, "I work for immigration and I have a lady and her daughter in custody that are going to be deported to Russia." The clerk opened the side door, and the two bounty hunters led Terets through the lobby in handcuffs, with her daughter trotting by her side. The clerk claimed that both men wore guns and official-looking badges.
Brickner denies the damning details of the government's case and says he never claimed to work for immigration, but he admits that the basic framework of the story is accurate. He did bring Terets and her daughter to the hotel, and lead the woman in handcuffs through the lobby, he says. Once in the room, he claims that he took off Terets' handcuffs and allowed her to move around freely. The affidavit makes no mention of what happened the next morning when Brickner brought the two immigrants to ICE's San Francisco field office, and neither the U.S. Attorney's Office nor ICE would discuss the details.
Brickner says the government is remaining mum because that part of the story reflects unfavorably on its case. "When I brought them in, Terets gave me a hug, and said, 'Thank you, thank you,' because we treated her well," he says. "We made phone calls for her, we didn't mistreat her or anything. She said, 'Thank you for being respectful.'" Brickner also says the immigration officer accepted Terets and her daughter into custody without protest, and thanked Brickner for bringing them in. The drop-off seemed no different than the dozens of others he had made across the country. A few hours later, Terets called Brickner on the phone, he says. She was no longer in custody, and she was angry. That's when he guessed that there was trouble on the horizon.
Terets and her daughter were released on "orders of supervision," a sort of legal limbo for immigrants who have final deportation orders, but who are allowed to remain in the country. They could remain in the country for the rest of their lives, or they could be deported at any time. Since they're willing to serve as government witnesses, their immigration status has probably measurably improved — a tearful 11-year-old girl on the witness stand could well seal Brickner's conviction.
Perhaps ICE foresees a time when they won't need bounty hunters like Brickner, a time when, flush with funding and manpower, they can stick to the moral high ground, and send legitimate government agents to pick up every stray immigrant. Maybe they're sending a message to other bounty hunters with Brickner's case, warning them that outrageous tactics will not be tolerated, and that people who can't stick to the rules should get out of the business. Or maybe they're putting on a nice show of doing so.
Even as one government department was arresting and indicting Brickner, several law enforcement agencies were irritated and inconvenienced when Brickner abruptly left the game in December. The U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were both keen to collect a man named James Armondo Watkins who Brickner had been tracking. Watkins was wanted on four separate warrants involving guns, drugs, and probation violations. They were depending on Brickner to seal the deal. Before Brickner's arrest, he had already set Watkins up to meet him in Stockton, and both agencies expected to take part in the raid.
Since the man's mother had recently died, Brickner set up a meeting at a notary's office, where Watkins believed he would collect a life insurance check for $14,000. Then Brickner was arrested, held for eight days, and released on the condition that he cease and desist his bounty hunting completely. When the Marshals office and an ATF agent called Brickner and asked for the place and time of the setup, Brickner said, "'Sorry, I can't give you any information,'" he remembers. "They called the U.S. Attorney's Office and they said, 'Nope, he can't give it to you.'"
Brickner says he had nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. Marshals, the ATF agents, and the Stockton SWAT team all showed up at the right notary's office, at the right time, and got their guy. But he does think that if government agents need the help of an indicted bounty hunter to get results, they shouldn't be embarrassed to ask.
"I think it's ridiculous," says Brickner. "We should all be working together."
Last edited by tsuggs on Wed 31 Jan 2007 19:12, edited 1 time in total.
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