The Biden administration has made a point of trying to deport immigrants with sex offenses on their records, so it’s surprising that they never went after Ransford Perry.
The Jamaican immigrant was first accused of trying to entice a 15-year-old boy into performing oral sex and ended up with a 2007 conviction for endangering the welfare of a child. A decade later, he was charged with forcible touching and endangerment of a child under 17. The Department of Homeland Security, at the time under the control of the Trump administration, attempted to deport him.
He fought in court, prolonging his case until 2021 when he lost his final appeal — but by then President Biden was in charge, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was being told to limit its arrests.
Mr. Perry, it turns out, didn’t meet Homeland Security’s threshold for being bad enough. So he was thrown back into the community, where authorities in Troy, New York, announced new charges against him on July 2: Two counts of rape, two counts of sexual abuse and one count of child endangerment charge, all stemming from his interaction with a 13-year-old girl.
“It’s utterly inexcusable that this predator was allowed to stay here to molest another child,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It is sad, but all too commonplace that criminals who could and should be deported are so frequently allowed to remain and re-offend because President Biden does not think immigration laws should be enforced.”
The Washington Times also reached out to Homeland Security, where Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said sex offenders should be priorities for deportation, but also crafted rules and policies that have limited who can be arrested and deported.
Among those rules are restrictions on where migrants can be arrested and new requirements that deportation officers look for ameliorating circumstances such as a migrant’s age, family connections or how far in the past a criminal offense is before seeking to oust them.
The chaos at the southern border also has tightly restricted detention space. That has forced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release thousands of immigrants without documentation, many with criminal records, back into communities.
Mr. Mayorkas’ restrictions on arrests had been partially confounded by court rulings, but the Supreme Court last week tossed out a challenge to the policy by Republican-led states, which could give the secretary even more leeway to limit arrests.
ICE officers say even before the justices’ ruling, they had been blocked from picking up aggravated felon drug dealers, gang members, drunken drivers and even a hit-and-run killer.
But it’s the sex offenders who really stick with them.
One ICE officer recalled targeting a sex assault case but was denied because the agency said it didn’t have enough bed space to hold the person for the weeks it might take to process them and get a travel document to send them home.
Another case involved someone convicted of sexually abusing a juvenile and who served a decade in prison. Officers were nearly certain the person was not a citizen and just needed to confirm it but were denied the chance to go talk to him.
“Now this guy’s in the wind. We don’t know where he’s at,” an officer said.
In the case of Mr. Perry, police in Troy said they investigated him over several months after a Feb. 24 encounter with a 13-year-old girl at his apartment. Police said the girl was a visitor, had no previous existing relationship with Mr. Perry and was forced to have sex against her will.
He faces charges of first- and second-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse and aggravated sexual abuse and child endangerment.
Mr. Perry arrived legally from Jamaica and became a lawful permanent resident in 1996. His first run-in with the law appears to be in 2005, when he was a child advocate who also worked as a Walmart Santa Claus — and used his access to children to pressure one for sex, according to the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York.
He would be convicted in 2007 of child endangerment.
In 2017, he was again arrested for an interaction with a juvenile, this time charged with child endangerment and forcible touching.
In 2018, immigration officers arrested him and began deportation proceedings. He was deemed enough of a danger or risk that he was held in detention while he fought his case. An immigration judge ordered him deported on Oct. 4, 2019, and he went to a federal district judge, the Board of Immigration Appeals and even the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to try to halt his removal.
The district court shot down his challenge in late 2019, the BIA in 2020 and the appeals court in late 2021.
It’s not clear from the court documents when he was released, nor why Homeland Security did not pursue removal.
Ms. Vaughan said ICE seems to have given Mr. Perry a break because of his age — he’s now 74 — and perhaps because of claims of medical issues. He said he suffered a heart attack while held in ICE detention in 2019.
But Ms. Vaughan said he was still healthy enough in 2017, when he was 68, to attempt to abuse a child, and apparently healthy enough at age 74 to be accused of raping a 13-year-old.
“Secretary Mayorkas should have to face the victim’s family, not to mention local law enforcement partners and members of Congress, and explain why this man was not removed after his multiple appeals failed,” Ms. Vaughan said. “This case is a tragic indictment of the Biden prioritization scheme, which works harder to protect criminal aliens from deportation than it does to protect Americans from the criminals.”
She pointed to last month’s Supreme Court ruling that shot down an attempt by GOP-led states that had sued to stop Mr. Mayorkas’ lenient deportation rules. The high court ruled the states didn’t have legal standing to sue, though the justices did not rule on whether Mr. Mayorkas’ policies are legal.
Ms. Vaughan said Congress could step in and create a right of action by victims such as the 13-year-old girl, which could give the courts a new avenue to referee Mr. Mayorkas’ policies.
It’s not clear if ICE has placed a new deportation “detainer” request on Mr. Perry so it can pick him up and try to deport him once his time with local authorities is concluded.
Neither the Troy police department, which made the arrest, nor the Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Department, which is holding Mr. Perry, responded to inquiries for this report.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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