In Denver, an individual who had fled from the Aurora ICE detention center on Tuesday was apprehended by the authorities early Friday morning. The Denver field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the arrest.
Joel Jose Gonzalez-Gonzalez and another escapee, Vido Romero Gueilond-Jose, managed to evade the ICE facility during a power outage late Tuesday. It took ICE over two hours to realize they were missing and an additional five hours to inform the police, as indicated by a timeline and call sheets provided by the Aurora Police Department to Denver7.
The Adams County Sheriff’s Office took Gonzalez-Gonzalez into custody around 4:30 a.m. on Friday in the vicinity of West 64th Avenue and Beach Street after he had been on the run for more than 48 hours. Gueilond-Jose remained at large.
ICE said Gonzalez-Gonzalez entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico in February of 2013. Immigration authorities found him at the Adams County Jail on Jan. 8 and arrested him on Feb. 12.
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Denver7 reached out to Adams County officials to learn more about the circumstances behind his initial arrest and what charges he faced, and has not heard back. ICE said only that Gonzalez-Gonzalez had been arrested on “local charges.”
He will return to ICE custody pending criminal and immigration proceedings, the agency said in a social media post Friday.
Aurora police on Thursday called a news conference to “set the record straight” about the response to the detainees’ escape. ICE said in its initial release that it “immediately” notified authorities.
“The Aurora Police Department was never asked to conduct an active search at the time of the escape, nor were we provided with any of the necessary details to do so,” police chief Todd Chamberlain said. “If they would have called and said, ‘Hey, these two escapees are out, and we see them running across the field, and we need you here now,’ we would have been there. But that is not what unfolded.”
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