THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT WHO BECAME A COP

National Review

 

The Illegal Immigrant Who Became a Cop

By Jim Geraghty

July 29, 2025 9:58 AM

 

On the menu today: It sounds unbelievable, but a small town in Maine hired a cop who was an illegal immigrant. According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, that’s exactly what happened; the local police force blames the E-Verify system, which is run by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, you may be surprised how many DACA recipients are ending up getting jobs in America’s local police forces.

 

An E-Verify Failure?

 

Next time a police officer asks for proof of citizenship, you may feel tempted to respond, “You first.”

 

Fox News’ Bill Melugin broke the shocking story of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest of Jamaican citizen Jon Luke Evans, who is in the U.S. illegally as a visa overstay and was hired as a cop by the Old Orchard Beach Police Department in Maine.

 

ICE, working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives arrested Jon Luke Evans July 25 in Biddeford, Maine. According to ICE, Evans lawfully entered the U.S. on September 24, 2023, at Miami International Airport. Evans was scheduled to depart the U.S. October 1, 2023, but never boarded the flight, “violating the terms of his lawful admission when he overstayed his visa.”

 

Jamaican citizens need a visa to enter the U.S., whether the purpose of the trip is tourism or work.

 

ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston Acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde issued a blistering statement:

 

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Jon Luke Evans not only broke U.S. immigration law, but he also illegally attempted to purchase a firearm. Shockingly, Evans was employed as a local law enforcement officer. The fact that a police department would hire an illegal alien and unlawfully issue him a firearm while on duty would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. We have a police department that was knowingly breaking the very law they are charged with enforcing, in order to employ an illegal alien. ICE Boston will continue to prioritize public safety by arresting and removing criminal alien threats from our New England communities.

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Here’s where the story gets curious. The local police chief insists all of Evan’s paperwork, including verification of his immigration status and legal authority to work, checked out with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. From the Boston Globe:

 

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Old Orchard Beach’s police chief, Elise Chard, issued a statement that said when the department hired Evans, the US Department of Homeland Security, on May 12, verified and approved Evans’s authorization to work in the US.

 

“Evans would not have been permitted to begin work as a reserve officer until and unless Homeland Security verified his status‚” Chard’s statement said.

 

“The Police Department was notified that Evans was legally permitted to work in the U.S., and his I-766 Employment Authorization Document was not set to expire until March 2030,” Chard said.

 

The department was not officially notified of Evans’ detention and only learned about it when ICE issued a news release, Chard’s statement said. . . .

 

“As part of the hiring process, the Town reviewed multiple forms of identification, including photo identification, and submitted Evans’ I-9 form to the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify Program,” Chard’s statement said. “The Department of Homeland Security then verified that Evans was authorized to work in the U.S.”

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Does E-Verify work? Apparently, not so well. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month:

 

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The program, called E-Verify, has vulnerabilities that enable migrants in the U.S. to illegally obtain jobs at American companies.

 

On its website, the government tells employers E-Verify offers “peace of mind that your employees are legally authorized to work.” Participating companies gain a safe harbor from legal penalties. But it can also provide a false sense of security, as some employers have discovered.

 

E-Verify, which matches names to Social Security numbers, has limited access to many other official databases with personal information. It doesn’t use biometric evidence or, in many cases, a photo to verify a new hire’s identity. It can thus be circumvented with a stolen Social Security number and fake driver’s license, according to current and former officials, congressional staffers and cybersecurity experts.

 

Meat producer Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Neb., had been using E-Verify for more than a decade, said owner Gary Rohwer. On June 11, dozens of masked federal agents descended on Rohwer’s plant and, using Tasers and dogs, detained 76 workers.

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As it’s been described, E-Verify checks the job applicant’s name, date of birth, and Social Security number against government databases. What it doesn’t do is verify that the name, date of birth, and Social Security number provided by the applicant actually belongs to the applicant.

 

E-Verify insists it has a terrific performance — that more than 98 percent of workers who it checks are confirmed as “work authorized” within 24 hours, requiring no further employer or employee action. Of the remaining 1.7 percent or so, about two-tenths of 1 percent are later confirmed as work authorized, and 1.5 percent are found to be not authorized to work in the U.S.

 

Now, it’s one thing for a meatpacking plant to get fooled by stolen Social Security numbers and fake driver’s licenses. But it’s considerably worse, and more embarrassing, when a local police department gets fooled. Do the officers of the Old Orchard Beach Police Department have to check IDs in the course of their duties? Say, pulling over a speeding driver, or checking the ID of a seemingly underage drinker in a bar?

 

(Yes, under federal law, it is illegal to hire an illegal immigrant, “knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien,” and it is also illegal to continue to employ an illegal immigrant “knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.”)

 

You might think that to become a police officer, you must be a U.S. citizen, but Colorado, Vermont, and West Virginia do not require that an officer be a U.S. citizen. (This means a green-card holder or legal permanent resident can become a police officer.) In 2023, California eliminated the state’s previous requirement of U.S. citizenship or permanent residency for police and now mandates that peace officers must merely be “legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law.”

 

In January 2024, CalMatters reported that about a dozen California law officers got jobs through the law, and profiled “a 26-year-old Mexican-born man” who “became the first officer hired by the UC Davis Police Department under a 1-year-old California law that repealed the U.S. citizenship requirement to become a peace officer in the state.”

 

(The officer’s name is Ernesto Moron, and you are going to think I am making fun of him, but I am not. That linked article features sentences like “Moron says,” and “UC Davis Police Chief Joe Farrow swore Moron in as a law enforcement officer,” and “Farrow saw in Moron a hope for a future,” and it’s just a particularly unfortunate surname.)

 

Several states allow those covered under DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — to become police officers. About 530,000 individuals had active DACA status as of September 30, 2024. Currently, DACA recipients can renew their status but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is not issuing new DACA statuses.

 

DACA is a strange limbo status, in that the individual is no longer under threat to be deported to their country of birth; as CIS describes, “An individual is not considered to be unlawfully present during the period when deferred action is in effect.” However, “Deferred action does not confer lawful immigration status upon an individual, nor does it excuse any previous or subsequent periods of unlawful presence they may have.”

 

An interesting complication is that DACA recipients are generally barred from purchasing or owning a firearm under federal law, because while they may be protected from deportation, they are not considered lawfully present in the United States. With that in mind, some states like Colorado have enacted their own gun laws allowing DACA recipients to possess firearms in certain circumstances.

 

In addition to California, Illinois changed its law in 2023. In 2024, Chief Geoffery Farr of Blue Island, Ill., described his recent hires:

 

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We currently have three DACA officers, all of whom are part-time. Officer Mitchell Soto Rodriguez became state-certified after graduating from the academy in January 2024. She is expected to be sworn-in as a full-time officer on April 9. Officer Soto Rodriguez will soon become the first full-time female DACA officer in the State of Illinois. The other two officers are slated to attend the police academy this month.

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Washington State changed its law in 2024:

 

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Sen. John Lovick, D-Mill Creek, a retired trooper of 30 years who sponsored the bill in the Washington Legislature to start a similar program here.

 

Lovick explained that this new program offers multiple benefits for Washington law enforcement agencies.

 

“And I’m not just talking about diversity, I also want to talk about culture,” Lovick said. “We believe that our DACA recipients will change the culture of policing in our state.”

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New Mexico changed its law earlier this year, and Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, boasted, “It literally turns dreamers into defenders, and this is something that could not have been done without a state law change.”

 

Earlier this year, Fox News profiled Edgar Vasquez Silva, a DACA recipient who is a deputy for Stone County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas. “Though restricted from patrol duties that require carrying a firearm due to his non-citizen status and state law, Silva found other ways to contribute, especially as a bilingual officer serving Hispanic communities that can sometimes be fearful of police.”

 

ADDENDA: In case you missed it, crime has actually gone down in New York City for much of this year . . . not that it’s doing incumbent Mayor Eric Adams any good in his bid for reelection. (I love the commenter who insisted that the post was “disinformation” because the city “just makes up stats.” There’s a valid argument somewhere in there about unreported crime, but at some point, a violent crime gets nearly impossible to cover up, as well as a violent crime wave. Are the morgues hiding the murder victims? Are the hospitals hiding the gunshot and stabbing victims?

 

Elsewhere, it is true that President Trump’s more hawkish actions indicate that “non-interventionists” like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance have less influence than they expected. But it doesn’t quite mean “personnel isn’t policy,” as some claim, because Trump also has Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz and John Ratcliffe around him, who were all on the more hawkish side of the foreign-policy spectrum. When a president’s cabinet is a team of rivals, some faction is always going to end up on the losing side.

 

Over at that other Washington publication I write for, an observation that poll after poll shows the Democratic Party at or near all-time lows in favorability among the electorate. But if you’re going to be unpopular, an off year after a presidential election is a pretty good time to do it, with so few elections in 2025 — and the few that are going on this year look pretty good for Democrats. The party has 461 days to get its act together for the 2026 midterms, which is plenty of time. What must be driving the DNC batty is that polling now shows Americans disapproving of President Trump and his policies . . . and then turning around and saying they trust Republicans to handle the same issues more than the Democrats.