Juan Felix-Avendano, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, was convicted of killing Special Olympian Craig Schimming and injuring his elderly parents as they drove to church in a horrific drunk-and-drugged driving crash in Milwaukee on New Year’s Day 2023. He had smoked crystal meth and was so intoxicated that he didn’t even remember leaving his house, according to a criminal complaint. The “speedometer was stuck at 110 mph.” He is currently in a Wisconsin prison.
News stories on the crash did not mention that he was a noncitizen, although they did mention that he was an “unlicensed driver.”
A GoFundMe page was set up to help the Schimming family. See it here.
Each day, from Sept. 25 through the presidential election, we tell you about a non-citizen currently in a Wisconsin jail who is accused of committing a horrific crime. ICE placed immigration detainers on each of them. We are highlighting a range of serious crimes. In most cases, they are people currently held in jails in Wisconsin. In this case, Felix-Avendano is now in prison.
Right now, the case of a non-citizen Venezuelan gang member accused of sexually assaulting a teen and woman in Prairie Du Chien has grabbed the public’s attention. It’s not an outlier. Real victims, communities, and taxpayers are paying the price of weak Biden/Harris border policies, which are abetted by politicians like U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Every state is a border state. Do all illegal immigrants commit crimes once they get to Wisconsin? Of course not. However, this is the side of the immigration equation the media don’t often rush to tell. And it’s a very consequential one.
FILE #5
The Defendant: Juan Felix-Avendano
The Jail: Wisconsin State Prison System – Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility.
The Charges: Convicted in Milwaukee County of:
Homicide by Use of Vehicle with A Prohibited Alcohol Concentration
2 counts of Injury By Intoxicated Use Of A Vehicle
The Victims: Craig Schimming and his parents George and Jan
Date of Offense: Sunday, January 1, 2023, at 9811 West Good Hope Road, in
the City of Milwaukee
Past Charges in Wisconsin: None
The Details:
Juan Felix-Avendano, the non-citizen accused of killing a Special Olympian in a horrific drunk-driving crash in Milwaukee County, had smoked crystal meth and was so intoxicated that he didn’t even remember leaving his house, according to a criminal complaint.
Felix-Avendano’s Volkswagen had severe front-end damage and the “speedometer was stuck at 110 mph. An open bottle of beer was on the driver’s floorboard and a can of Modelo beer was in the back seat,” the complaint says. The crash injured Jan and George Schimming, 76 and 78 years old, of Menomonee Falls, and killed their special needs son, Craig Schimming, 52. They were on their way to church.
We also obtained the arrest detention report from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department. It says Felix-Avendano is from Juajuaca, Mexico, and it confirms that he is not a U.S. citizen. Read it here: 23000071 – FELIX-AVENDANO – JUAN – – Custody Packet_Redacted. Law enforcement sources tell us Felix-Avendano is an illegal immigrant, which the rest of the media are refusing to report.
However, because of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department’s policies on ICE and illegal immigrants, there was no immigration hold on Felix-Avendano when he was first placed in the jail, the Sheriff’s Department told us. “The agency has no involvement with this individual,” ICE told Wisconsin Right Now at the time.
According to the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department, at the time: “an extensive search was conducted, and we have no records responsive to your request regarding any immigration hold on Juan Felix-Avendano.”
In 2019, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission approved a new policy to require a federal warrant signed by a judge for police in Milwaukee to “assist in immigration enforcement” in all but the most serious of cases. At that time, the policy was applauded by then-Mayor Tom Barrett and pro-immigration activists, CBS 58 reported.
In 2019, then Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas announced that the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department would no longer provide information on inmates’ immigration status to ICE. Lucas called it “the right thing to do.”
According to the criminal complaint, when officers arrived, they saw a red Volkswagen and Toyota Rav4 at the scene. Felix-Avendano was driving the Volkswagen. The victim and his elderly parents were in the other vehicle.
Both the victim and his mother sustained serious injuries and were in critical condition at the hospital. Officers at the hospital reported that Juan Felix-Avendano “appeared to be intoxicated.”
The posted speed limit was 40 miles per hour.
The suspect, while traveling at a high rate of speed, hit the rear of the Toyota, according to the complaint.
Schimming’s mother was on life support and it was believed she was paralyzed from the neck down. Her husband had a brain bleed.
His blood alcohol content was .147, the complaint says.
According to the complaint:
Mr. Schimming said that he lives in Menomonee Falls with his wife and their disabled son, and they were on their way to church. He was driving the speed limit. He remembers being spun and losing consciousness.
Felix-Avendano told police he was at work until 8:30 p.m. and drank a glass of beer and had one shot at work. On his way home, he drank a Michelanda and a Modelo.
He arrived home and was talking to his wife in Mexico from 12:30 to 1 a.m.
After he hung up, he smoked crystal meth, and then entered the house, where he drank four Modelo beers. He tried to call his wife, but she did not answer.
He was upset and went to a New Year’s gathering and continued drinking, the complaint says.
He drank a Modelo and Corona but does not remember what else he drank. He does not recall leaving the house in his vehicle but he recalls the impact from the accident and that his vehicle was smoking, it says.
“He does not recall where he was driving when the accident occurred since he was drunk,” the complaint says.
He admitted being responsible for the crash and said he has never had a license, the complaint says.
Read the criminal complaint here:
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Open in new tab It says that the Schimmings were on their way to Eastbrook Church at 7:30 a.m. Craig was a member of the Special Olympics with special needs, who was known as a gentle giant, the pastor said. WTMJ-TV reported that Craig Schimming was a church greeter who volunteered in the church’s preschool with his mom.
Wisconsin Right Now has obtained an interview Eastbrook church did with Jan Schimming; the article describes how she volunteered for a non-profit medical center providing care to people without insurance. She said in the story that she had a nursing background, and she and her husband had been missionaries in Africa,
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.
ICE revealed that this month that “there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket which includes those detained by ICE and on the agency’s non-detained docket.” Of that, more than 13,000 are convicted murderers.
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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