Whether to disappoint or frighten the undocumented, several people have pretended to be agents of the Immigration and Customs Service (ICE) in recent years. A peculiar case occurred in Kansas, where a man He came to a local jail claiming to be an ICE officer. His failed plan contemplated freeing his undocumented friend, who was arrested for using the identity of a US citizen.
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The false ICE agent, Andrew J. Pleviak, 42, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Wichita to nine months in prison This 42-year-old man worked for ICE, but he was already out of that dependency when he tried to help the migrant Juan Tapia Alfaro on September 3, 2019.
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Tapia Alfaro met Pleviak when he worked at his home in Topeka, according to the accusation.
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The migrant was arrested on August 2, 2019 by agents from ICE, the Kingman County Sheriff and the Kansas Department of Revenue. The steps followed because he obtained a driver’s license using the birth certificate and Social Security number of a Puerto Rican.
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A month later, Pleviak began to make up his plan on September 2. That day he called Kingman Jail posing as Doug Thompson, ICE supervisor in Wichita, and affirming that Tapia Alfaro He was an informant who worked for ICE and the Administration for Drug Control (DEA).
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That request seemed strange to the agent who took the call and immediately contacted the local ICE office. This was confirmed in the voice of supervisor Thompson himself I had been talking with an imposter. After analyzing the audio of that call they discovered that it was the exagent federal Pleviak.
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The authorities let him continue with his deception to see how far he went. Without suspecting that he was being set up, this man showed up on September 3 at Kingman’s prison and showed a letter pretending to have been written by the ICE manager in Wichita.
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This said the false memo:
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Mr. Tapia Alfaro has been working with the DEA in Wichita, Kansas, for more than a year. He is your most important confidential informant for the main drug traffickers in Kansas. Without Mr. Tapia Alfaro working for them on the streets, the case in which they have been working for more than a year will stop.
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The DEA contacted me last week and asked me to remove the arrest warrant and try to have the charges dropped or to be given a bond to have his wife pay as soon as possible, so he can be released.
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After reviewing Mr. Tapia Alfaro’s immigration history, the crimes committed, the time he has been in the United States (18 years) and the fact that he has four US citizen children, ICE will eliminate the arrest warrant against him from today.
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Eleven minutes after his arrival at the jail lobby, Pleviak was taken into custody by the Kingman Sheriff. The next day, the true ICE supervisor in that region verified that the memorandum he showed was completely false and that the signature on it was not his.
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In addition to the apocryphal document, other evidence remained: five audio calls which he did to the jail officers between September 1 and 3.
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Pleviak pleaded guilty in December to a charge: falsely claim that he was an ICE officer.
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“I hope to receive clemency, but I am willing to accept any punishment allowed by law that the court deems appropriate to impose ”, He wrote in a letter in which he accepted his crime.
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This case was investigated by the Kingman Sheriff, the National Security Investigations Service (HSI) and the Kansas District Department of Justice (DOJ).
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