NELSON W MIJANGO SANTOS is accused of partially “disemboweling” a man with a silver folding knife in a Madison parking lot after telling him, “Do you want to die?” and “Do you want to see the devil with me?” The victim’s intestines were hanging out of his stomach.
Santos then led police on a dangerous pursuit that ended when he produced a possibly fake firearm that he pointed at officers and a machete-like sword, stabbing himself repeatedly after demanding that officers shoot him, the complaint says.
He is being held in the Dane County Jail on an ICE immigration hold. At the time of the stabbing, he was out on two $500 signature bonds for repeat drunk driving and operating after revocation in Dane County.
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.
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 #3
The Defendant: NELSON W MIJANGO SANTOS
The Jail: Dane County, Wisconsin (note that the Jail is listed by ICE as non-cooperative. It does not honor all ICE detainers and does not give ICE the full 48 hours ICE requests to pick up people with detainers.)
The Charges: Attempt 1st Degree Intentional Homicide; Attempt to Flee or Elude an Officer (both felonies); Resisting an officer; Disorderly Conduct With Use of a Dangerous Weapon; Failure to Comply With an Officer; 2 Counts of Bail Jumping
Date of Offenses: Aug. 16, 2024
ICE Hold: Yes, placed on him on 8/23/2024 in the Dane Co Jail.
Past Cases in Wisconsin:
-Pending at the time of the stabbing: 2nd offense OWI; operating after revocation. See records here. Court commissioner in Dane County, W. Scott McAndrew, freed him on a $500 signature bond on June 27. The public defender appointed counsel. He required an interpreter. A warrant was issued when he did not show up for court on Aug. 19.
-Pending at the time of the stabbing: Operating after revocation due to prohibited alcohol concentration. See records here. Brian Asmus gave him a $500 signature bond. A warrant was issued on Aug. 19 when he didn’t show up for court. This charge was filed in May.
-2021 forfeiture for operating without a valid license.
-The current complaint notes that officers recognized Santos from a previous incident involving “machetes and knives.”
The Details: According to the criminal complaint, on August 16, at around 8:15 p.m., an officer responded to a call for service at the Men’s Shelter in Madison. Sounds of a disturbance were coming from the parking lot. He saw a man near the door of a vehicle. The vehicle accelerated “aggressively” toward the exit while the person in the rear passenger seat was partially inside and partially outside of the vehicle with the door open, the complaint says.
The complaint further alleges that:
Several other people on the scene were shouting in Spanish and pointing towards the vehicle. The officer ran after the vehicle to get it to stop but it did not. The officer could not get a license plate because there was a cover over the top of it. The officer ran after the car. It accelerated “aggressively” on Zeier Road.
The officer spoke with an individual AJO who was involved in the disturbance. He lifted his black T-shirt and showed the officer a stomach wound “with what appeared to be his intestines sticking out of his stomach.” A person at the scene who spoke Spanish told the office that AJO “claimed to have been stabbed in his stomach prior to police arrival.” He was taken to the hospital.
Th officer described the silver SUV as “peeling out of the parking lot.” Another officer began to tail it.
A police officer recognized the driver Nelson W Mijango Santos “from a previous call involving machetes and knives.” That occurred at the Safe Haven located off Nakoosa. The officers pulled over the car and ordered the defendant to show them his hands and comply. He went back inside the car instead. The officer observed “several sharp and shiny-like objects” in the vehicle. The defendant refused to exit the vehicle. Instead, he closed the door and locked it.
While the officers were outside trying to get him to open the door, the defendant grabbed “an open container of Bud Light beer and was drinking it.” He was also pointing towards his throat and mouthing the words, “Shoot me.” He had a sharp pointed tool lying immediately on his lap. He allowed his vehicle to jolt forward, the complaint says.
Another officer arrived and began attempting to break the defendant’s window. The officers deployed tire deflation devices. He continued to not comply. He then accelerated rapidly. A vehicle pursuit was initiated, the complaint says. His rear tires completely deflated and he exited the vehicle when it stopped, with slurred speech and sobbing. He retrieved a metal firearm from his vehicle. He raised the firearm up pointing it towards the direction of the officers but the tip was orange so an officer called out “orange tip” because it was possibly fake, the complaint says.
He grabbed a long black machete-style sword from inside the vehicle, holding it in his left hand. He also reached into the door to get a sharp pointed tool while continuously calling out to officers to kill him, the complaint says. He then began to stab himself in the chest area.
The defendant kept crying and yelling out that officers should shoot him. Multiple less lethal rounds were deployed at him, and he still continued to try and stab himself, the complaint says. Eventually, he fell limp on the pavement and wasn’t moving. Officers obtained control of him using a ballistic shield. He claimed the victim was trying to kill him and he was defending himself and he was just sleeping in his car.
He said he stabbed the other guy with a machete, and “it felt like I had killed him,” and he called the victim a “piece of shit.” He made the statements in Spanish.
The victim told police he was coming from the Kwik Trip to the parking lot of the men’s shelter. The defendant started arguing with him. The defendant pushed him and grabbed a silver folding knife, saying, “Do you want me to cut you, bro.” He lunged at him and stabbed him in the stomach just below the belly button. “I thought I could die,” the complaint says.
The victim said he found the suspect on the jail “residents” page (which is what the Dane County sheriff calls inmates). He identified him as the person who stabbed him. According to the complaint, a video showed the victim trying to avoid the defendant.
The defendant was captured on audio saying, “Do you want to die?” and “Do you want to see the devil with me?” the complaint says.
According to the complaint, the defendant was released from custody on bail in two pending criminal cases for operating after revocation and second-offense OWI when the incident occurred.
A UW police officer arrived to assist in translation. The victim was “in a lot of pain from the stab wound.” The victim was “at least partially disemboweled, prompting the need for emergency surgery,” the complaint says.
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.
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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