Mario Paguada Cruz is accused of leading Stoughton, Wisconsin, police on a high-speed pursuit that spanned 11 miles and reached top speeds of 116 MPH in a stolen car. He produced a Guatemalan passport and is held in the Dane County jail on an ICE detainer. A competency hearing is now scheduled in his case. He has never had a valid Wisconsin driver’s license.
Each day, from Sept. 25 through the presidential election, we’ll expose a non-citizen currently in a Wisconsin jail who is accused of committing a horrific crime. ICE placed immigration detainers on them. We are highlighting a range of serious crimes.
Weak Biden/Harris border policies on immigration, aided and abetted by politicians like U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, have caused heightened attention to the issue. Every state is a border state.
FILE #12
The Accused: Mario Paguada Cruz
Mario Paguada Cruz
Charges: Disorderly Conduct (use of dangerous weapon), Knowingly flee officer
Previous cases in Wisconsin:
Disorderly Conduct
Traffic offenses, civil suit by insurance company
Details:
According to the felony criminal complaint:
At 9:33 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2024, a Stoughton police officer was alerted that a white Toyota Corolla was coming into Stoughton on STH 138 that “was driving into oncoming lanes” and “continually turning their lights on and off.”
The plate came back as stolen out of Madison and the driver was identified by his Guatemalan passport.
Two squads activated their lights and sirens and tried to stop Cruz but he did not stop, the complaint says. Officers placed a tire deflation device on East Main Street, but he avoided it and failed to stop at a stopsign and then blew through multiple other stop signs.
He then struck a curb and still continued on. He drove toward an officer but then drove around him. He reached speeds of 60.2 MPHH on Main Street, the complaint says.
He drove over a curb onto the sidewalk and grass area to get around another tire deflation device, it says.
He continued to flee. At a top speed on Highway 51, he was going 113.3 MPH.
He turned onto I-90 and was going over 114 MPH.
Overall the pursuit reached top speeds of 116 MPH and spanned 11 miles, the complaint says.
He was eventually pulled over at which point officers found a bread knife “used during commission of MAPD’s domestic crime.” That was not further explained in the felony complaint. But he is also facing a separate charge of disorderly conduct while armed, a misdemeanor. His address was given as a Madison apartment.
He had never been issued a driver’s license, according to the complaint.
Jail: Is in Dane Co Jail on ICE detainer hold.
Date of Offense: Thursday, September 5, 2024, in the City of
Stoughton, Dane County, Wisconsin
Country of Origin: Guatemalan passport
ICE detainer: 9/6/24 in Dane County.
Criminal Complaint:
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Open in new tab ICE Detainers Plunge Under Biden-Harris
Illegal immigrants committing crimes is not a story that the corporate media and Vice President Kamala Harris want to tell, especially as border crossings have surged.
Under Biden/Harris, the number of U.S Border Patrol “encounters with migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico in December 2023” hit “the highest monthly total on record,” according to Pew Research Center.
The Biden administration issued just under 300,000 detainers from 2021 through the first quarter of 2024, a rising number, according to Trac Immigration, a project of Syracuse University. However, “overall 50 percent more ICE detainers were issued during the Trump presidency (FY 2017 – FY 2020),” Trac says.
Detainers “are critical for ICE to be able to identify and ultimately remove criminal aliens who are currently in federal, state or local custody,” ICE says. ICE detainers ask local law enforcement to hold a non-citizen inmate for 48 hours before release into the community so ICE can pick them up.
Inmates with detainers are only the people that ICE discovers and where ICE decides to act. Some jails, such as Dane County’s, don’t honor all ICE detainers and don’t give ICE 48 hours to pick up the inmates before release. At the other end of the spectrum stands a jail like Waukesha County, where the sheriff received federal immigration authority through a program called 287g.
ICE detainers “are often used as one indicator of the intensity of what is called ‘interior enforcement’ in contrast to ‘border enforcement,’ Trac writes.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “has long claimed that detainers, often called ‘immigration holds,’ are an essential tool needed to apprehend and deport individuals not authorized to remain in the U.S.,” the site says. “Detainers are supposed to be targeted at noncitizens who have committed crimes here in the U.S.”
In addition, the U.S. Border Patrol has arrested more than 15,000 criminal non-citizens in 2024 alone, including 27 murderers and 202 people for sexual offenses. But those are just the people they catch.
From 2006 to 2023, ICE placed detainers on more than 14,000 non-citizens living in Wisconsin, Trac says.
The first year of Biden-Harris saw the lowest numbers of ICE detainers issued since at least 2006. The Milwaukee and Dane County Jails had the most ICE detainers issued of any jurisdictions in Wisconsin during the time frame below, according to Trac.
The corporate media tend to focus on studies that show illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than non-citizens or they focus mostly on the other side of the coin – say, illegal immigrants whose labor helps keep dairy farms alive. The citizens who committed crimes had a right to be here; illegal immigrants did not. A tougher border policy might have prevented illegal immigrant crimes from occurring in the first place. The stories are worth telling.
“Although no federal law requires cooperation with ICE, many state and local laws, and sometimes court rulings, regulate compliance with ICE detainers,” The Immigrant Legal Resource Center says. Some states have made compliance mandatory, but Wisconsin is not one of them.
“Legally, the requirement of probable cause means ICE can only issue a detainer against (a) a noncitizen, who (b) is already ‘removable.’ A removable noncitizen is someone who can be put in removal proceedings for possible deportation,” the center says.
“ICE describes a detainer as a request to a ‘law enforcement agency to notify ICE before a removable individual is released from custody and to maintain custody of the noncitizen for a brief period so that ICE can take custody of that person,'” Trac says.
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