Juan Carlos Rocha Mejia and Elia Antonio are both illegal immigrants. According to a criminal complaint from May 2024 in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, Antonio is accused of selling her 12-year-old daughter to Rocha Mejia to rape. After Rocha Mejia touched the girl’s private parts in a van with her mother present and tried to tape her hands, she fought him off and ran to a nearby house, the complaint says.
“The investigation reflects the defendants are illegally in the United States and ICE detainers have been placed on the defendants,” – Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney
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 #6
The Accused:
Juan Carlos Rocha Mejia and Elia Antonio.
The Jail: Fond du Lac County (Crimes occurred in the Town of Oakfield).
The Charges:
Juan Carlos Rocha Mejia: First Degree Sexual Assault, Child Enticement,
Strangulation/Suffocation, and False Imprisonment.
As part of the same case, Elia Antonio has been charged with Trafficking of a Child, Failure to Protect a Child, and bail jumping.
The Victim: 12-year-old girl.
Date of Offense: May 18, 2024
Past Charges in Wisconsin:
Rocha Mejia: No priors listed.
Antonio: At the time of this incident, Elia “was out on bail in the following two cases: (1) Dodge County Case number 2023CM000233, where she is charged with Possession of Cocaine and Possession of Drug Paraphernalia, and (2) Fond du Lac County Case number 2024CM000256, where she is charged with Possession of Cocaine, Possession of Drug Paraphernalia, and Misdemeanor Bail Jumping. As part of Elia’s conditions of release on bail in both cases, ELIA had conditions that included not to commit any new crimes,” the complaint says. She has many prior traffic cases, including for operating after revocation. She has convictions for resisting an officer,
The Details:
Criminal Complaint:
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric J. Toney announced the charges. “Sadly, human trafficking exists all over the world, including Fond du Lac County,” Toney said. “We will always stand with law enforcement to protect our community from monsters that prey on children and ensure they’re held accountable in the justice system.”
The criminal complaint says a deputy was dispatched to a town in Fond du Lac County on May 19, 2024. He spoke with the victim, who was born in March 2012, making her 12 years old.
The victim said that Elia Antonio and Juan Carlos Rocha Mejia “were involved in an incident on May 18, 2024 leading to Juan having sexual contact over Victim 1’s clothing. Investigators learned that Elia is Victim 1’s mother and Juan is Elia’s boyfriend
The complaint alleges:
The victim said that Antonio told her to get in a van. She then picked up Rocha Mejia, who crawled from the front of the van to the back seats where the girl was and tried to blindfold her multiple times, but she put her hands in the way.
He taped her left hand to the seat of the van and tried to tape her other hand but she fought him off. She continued pushing Juan away and kicking and scratching at him. She was screaming at him, telling him to stop touching her. She referred to Juan “touching her lower parts.”
He touched and rubbed her private parts. He attempted to tape her legs but she kept fighting him, the complaint says.
The complaint also alleges:
She “fell onto the ground and Juan tried to rape her and make her faint by using a shirt to cover her nose and her mouth.” It made it difficult to breathe. She bit his hand.
She jumped out of the van. She ran toward a house. He got in the van and began driving close to her. She knocked on the door and the homeowner came and opened the door. She scraped her leg on a rock.
Antonio told authorities that Juan “has a lot of money and is one of the main ones” in Fond Du Lac. He has a drone “that follows her everywhere.” He has a lot of people who work for him. “I got to do whatever he tells me to do, obey him, because he told me I don’t have a life anymore,” she said.
According to the complaint:
He told her not to go to court in Juneau, Dodge County. “He told me if you go to court, I know that you’re going to open up your mouth and you better not go to court in Juneau because if you go there, I’ll lock you up, because I am the law they work for me,” Antonio told authorities.
Juan told her she was going to end up in acid or you won’t see your kids anymore. “He’s been trying to buy my daughter from me, buy like money, probably rape her you know like sell her to different people you know and stuff like that,” Antonio allegedly said. She claims she resisted this.
Antonio advised that Juan buys people with money and gave her “$250, it’s still in the car, I
did not even touch it, it’s still there.” Police found $272 in the car.
Antonio was asked, when you heard your daughter screaming, what was going through her head. She advised, “That they were like raping her, raping her or.” She was asked if she was concerned for the victim’s safety. Antonio started to cry and advised, “I was scared and didn’t know what to do.”
Antonio was asked to help detectives know the thought process of not calling law enforcement when you heard your daughter screaming. She advised, “Because he threatened me all the time, if I don’t accept, what he said, I won’t ever see my kids again,” she said, according to the complaint.
At one point, she told the girl, “Just lay there and pretend you’re asleep,” the complaint says.
“This tragic situation also highlights the ongoing dangers of Biden and the Democrat Party’s open border policies,” said Rep. Jerry O’Connor (R-Fond du Lac.) “The male suspect had illegally immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua,” he wrote. “He was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2021 only to be released under Biden’s ‘catch-and-release’ open borders policy. Until this administration gets serious about upholding the law and securing our border, situations like this are likely to happen with increasing frequency.”
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.
Table of Contents
