Los Angeles Becoming Safe Haven for Foreign Fugitives

One of Los Angeles’s biggest blessings is its ethnic diversity. By many estimates, Los Angeles is the world’s most ethnically diverse city with nearly every nationality represented here. In fact, it is home to the largest Armenian, Iranian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Thai populations in the Western Hemisphere and its Chinese population is second only to San Francisco’s as the largest in the United States.

And it also home to the largest Hispanic population north of the Mexican border, with roughly 35% of city’s nearly 4 million people claiming Hispanic-American heritage. Give another 10 years and Spanish may very well supplant English as the city’s most widely-spoken language.

But the fact that it is the most ethnically diverse city could also be a curse for the city. In recent years, it has been proven to be a primary destination for foreign fugitives, especially, not so surprising, fugitives from Latin American. They have easy access to high-quality fake documents here and can easily blend in with the city’s already enormous Hispanic population. Many hide in plain sight, with new names and appearances, and are able to hold jobs and even buy homes and start families.

Take Oliverio Grijalva Carrillo, who was suspected of fatally shooting a man in a bar in Guatemala, for instance. When finally caught, federal agents searched his home and found documents that identified him as Benigno Guevara Grijalva.

Perhaps the most notorious case is the one of Alfredo Rios Galeana, who was wanted in Mexico for escaping from prison and committing a string of killings, kidnappings and bank robberies. When he was finally apprehended he was running an office-cleaning business, had become involved in his neighborhood church and apparently had plastic surgery to make himself slightly less recognizable.

In the last three years, a total of 87 foreign fugitives have been apprehended in Los Angeles. Thousands more have also been apprehended by federal agents in other various parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Many are wanted in their foreign countries for murder, rape and other crimes. While some of the fugitives have been from countries around the world, including Korea, China and Hungary, most have been Mexico. That doesn’t exactly help the cause of those who insist that there is no need to do more to protect our very wide-opened borders.

Leads on cases come from foreign governments, local police and ordinary citizens. Many citizens watching Spanish-language television will notify the LAPD with suspicion that a suspect is a neighbor. Law enforcement agencies also regularly publicize a search for a foreign fugitive in an ethnic newspaper or check local post offices to see if a fugitive has been receiving mail.