5-time deported illegal alien charged with beating baby to death in Memphis

In another grim reminder than not all those pouring through our border from Central America are peaceful immigrants, a Honduran national was arrested by Memphis police on April 12 for allegedly beating a four-month-old baby to death.

Jose Avila-Agurcia, a 33-year-old illegal alien from Honduras, was charged with first-degree murder in Shleby County, Tennessee, this week for allegedly striking a four-month-old baby multiple times, inflicting fatal fractures to the baby’s skull and ribs. The child’s mother, Mercy Lizondro-Chacon, alleges that the suspect beat the baby to death when he found out that the baby was not his child after he previously assumed he had fathered the boy.

An ICE spokesman told CR that biometrics confirm that the suspect’s real name is Carlos Zuniga-Aviles, an illegal alien who was previously deported five times prior to this incident. The name Jose Avila-Agurcia is an alias he provided to local officials.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged an immigration detainer on unlawfully present Honduran national Carlos Zuniga-Aviles AKA Jose Avila-Agurcia following his arrest for murder in Shelby County, Tennessee,” said ICE spokesman Bryan Cox. “ICE will seek to take him into custody to reinstate his removal order following the resolution of the criminal charges he currently faces.”

According to ICE, the suspect was removed from the country first in Feb. 2010, and then four subsequent times – Jan. 2011, March 2012, Nov. 2015, and Dec. 2016. Two of those times he was caught by Border Patrol and removed; three other times he was deported by ICE.

In addition, Shelby County officials are refusing to comply with a state law requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE detainer requests. When it comes to an issue that is national in scope and affects the sovereignty and security of the whole of the people, some liberal politicians suddenly discover an affinity for localism to such a degree that they will even defy the feds and the state.

Florida is the latest state to consider legislation barring localities from denying ICE detainers and impeding federal immigration authorities. The Florida House passed the bill 69-47 on Wednesday, and the Senate is expected to debate the bill today.

The core function of government is protecting the citizenry from criminals, and the core function of the federal government, in particular, is to protect us from other countries’ people who would do us harm. That clearly starts with enforcement both at the border and in the interior.

ICE is now warning localities that don’t cooperate with detainers in order to shield illegal aliens from deportation that their actions will likely result in more deportations in their area. “Any local jurisdiction thinking that refusing to cooperate with ICE will result in a decrease in local immigration enforcement is mistaken,” said ICE in a statement. “Local jurisdictions that choose to not cooperate with ICE are likely to see an increase in ICE enforcement activity, as in jurisdictions that do not cooperate with ICE the agency has no choice but to conduct more at-large arrest operations. A consequence of ICE being forced to make more arrests on the streets is the agency is likely to encounter other unlawfully present foreign nationals that wouldn’t have been encountered had we been allowed to take custody of a criminal target within the confines of a local jail.”

Editor's note: The title of this article has been corrected to make it clear that Zuniga-Aviles has been charged with, not convicted of, the baby's murder. CR regrets the error.

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