Fidel Martinez-Cruz is accused of sexually assaulting a woman he didn’t know in a Hyatt hotel sauna in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as well as a teenage girl in a second attack. ICE has placed an immigration detainer on him.
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; the media tends to censor crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
ICE detainers require ICE to demonstrate that it has determined “that probable cause exists that the subject is a removable alien.”
Right now, the case of a non-citizen Venezuelan gang member accused of sexually assaulting a teen 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.
FILE #2
The Defendant: Fidel Martinez-Cruz
The Jail: Brown County, Wisconsin
The Charges: 2nd-degree sexual assault/unconscious victim; 3rd-degree sexual assault; attempted 3rd-degree sexual assault; 4th-degree sexual assault – three of the charges are felonies; one is a misdemeanor.
Date of Offenses: August 7 and August 19, 2024
The Details: Martinez-Cruz, 25, is accused of sexually assaulting two women in different incidents while he was staying at the Hyatt Hotel in Green Bay. He has a home address in Illinois.
The criminal complaint says that, on Aug. 19, 2024, an officer was on patrol when he received a call for a sexual assault at the Hyatt Hotel on Main Street in Green Bay. The victim, a 23- year-old female, was in the lobby with her friend, a 20-year-old male. She was visibly upset, with “tears running down her face,” the complaint says.
She said she was in the hotel sauna when a man she did not know started touching her private parts and placed his genitals “on her lips,” the complaint says. She escaped the man by slapping him and running out of the room. Officers began searching for the man, it says.
The man with the victim said that she ran out of the sauna and said someone had just touched her, so he went and confronted the man in the bathroom. He pushed him to the ground, the complaint says. The suspect was described as a Hispanic male who did not speak English and tried to use his phone to translate.
Officers suspected the man was a guest, so they monitored the skywalk. An officer sent an email with surveillance photos of the suspect and another male. They ran license plates, the complaint says. They identified the suspect and went to his room. He was with an 82-year-old man. The suspect’s swimsuit was recovered in the sink and matched a swimsuit in the surveillance photo. He denied sexually assaulting the victim.
That same day, officers responded to a sexual assault that was reported by a minor. Victim #2 is a 17 year old female. The complaint says she was “very emotional” about what had happened.
Her mother did not know what happened. She said that on August 7, she and two friends were at Fiesta Latina Restaurant on University Avenue when a group of men paid for their meal and tried to talk to them, the complaint says.
One of the victim’s friends wanted to visit the men who had a room at the Hyatt, the complaint says. She brought her friend to the hotel and was just going to drop her and her other friend off and leave, but victim 2 got worried and followed them inside.
She was given a beer to drink, and her memory of it became spotty. She ended up waking up with a man named “Jorge” on top of her, raping her, the complaint says. She pushed him off and got out of the room. Her friend was passed out in a different part of the hotel room. She helped pick her up and brought her to her car. She said, “Jorge” had tried to call her, but she ignored his calls. She gave his number to the officers.
The number listed to Martinez Cruz, the complaint says. Body cam footage from the first incident demonstrated that “Jorge” was Martinez-Cruz, according to the complaint. A photo lineup was given to victim 2, who picked out Martinez-Cruz as her attacker.
ICE detainer: Issued 8/20/24
Past Cases in Wisconsin: None. He’s from West Chicago, Illinois.
Fidel Martinez-Cruz Criminal Complaint:
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.
As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket—13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS!
Americans deserve to be SAFE in our own communities. pic.twitter.com/fIoCAduJ9M
— Rep. Tony Gonzales (@RepTonyGonzales) September 27, 2024
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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