Suspect in custody
German Adriano Llangari Inga, an illegal Ecuadorian immigrant, has been arrested and is being held in the Hennepin County jail.
Llangari Inga is accused of drunk driving/criminal vehicular homicide arising out of a horrific car crash in north Minneapolis back in August. I wrote about the incident last week. He is being held on $150,000 bail, with a court hearing scheduled for this afternoon. He has requested an interpreter for his hearing.
His case is notable for a few reasons. He was originally arrested soon after the crash last August, but was released without charges and without notifying ICE, who had filed a detainer against him.
Charges were filed against Llangari Inga for the very first time last week (three felonies, two gross misdemeanors), accompanied by an arrest warrant, nine months after the incident. An unrelated case was filed minutes later in Hennepin County court with a similar set of facts. In the other case, a woman is accused of a single car-related homicide, but is being held on $2 million bail, more than 13 times greater than Llangari Inga’s bail.
Over the weekend, the Trump White House (not Trump himself) commented on the case. That prompted a Minneapolis Star Tribune follow-up story with the headline:
White House blasts Twin Cities as ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ after immigrant’s fatal crash.
A Trump spokesman said an ICE order to have the Ecuadorean national kept in a Twin Cities jail soon after the crash was not enforced.
The spokesman is named Alexander Pfeiffer. The Star Tribune reports,
Llangari Inga could not be located, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was arrested eight days later by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and jailed midday Saturday.
The Sheriff’s Office has yet to disclose how it found Llangari Inga.
The Star Tribune continues,
Pointing out that Llangari Inga was not turned over to immigration officials soon after the crash and was briefly a fugitive after being charged, White House spokesman Alexander Pfeiffer said in a statement, “An illegal immigrant drove drunk, killed an innocent mother, and was on the run because Democrats didn’t do their most important job: protect their constituents.”
The word “briefly” is doing hard work in the sentence above. It took soft-on-crime Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty nine (9) months to file charges (not the seven-month interval falsely claimed by the Star Tribune). The county sheriff cites the authority of state Attorney General Keith Ellison in refusing to honor the ICE detainer last August.
The Star Tribune quotes Pfeiffer:
At the time of the crash, Llangari Inga was the subject of an ICE order in 2016 for expedited removal from the United States, Pfeiffer said.
In theory, Llangari Inga could be released from jail today on bond, putting up as little as $15,000 in cash. Then what would ICE do?
His next court appearance has been set for June 11.
Stay tuned!