Custer Deputies Bust
Four Mexican Illegals
Plus, a Sinister Twist

by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary

About 1:25 p.m. on Wednesday, January 29th, Custer County Sheriff’s Deputy Daniel Santiago was patrolling State Highway 96 (aka, Hardscrabble Road, or just the Scrabble. It runs from Wetmore up the mountain to Silver Cliff and Westcliffe.) and got behind a somewhat older (2002) white Ford box van. Around mile marker 18 (near MacKenzie Junction). Noticing that the van had a defective taillight, the Deputy lit up his lights and pulled the van over.
Custer County Deputy Christopher Dunbaugh arrived soon after the stop to assist.
Deputy Santiago approached the van from the driver’s side. The van’s driver’s window was down and Deputy Santiago noticed the van contained four Hispanic males. The Deputy asked the driver for license, registration and insurance. The driver responded, in English, but with a Hispanic accent that he had none of these. Santiago then asked for ID from him and the other occupants, and they produced various Mexican documents, none of which had any legal status in the U.S. and none showed that they had permission to be in our country.
Deputy Santiago then asked the driver his name which was given. The Deputy then returned to his car and asked FRECOM Dispatch to run the name. Nothing came back. Santiago went back to the van and talked to the driver again, and after a bit, the driver gave him a second name, somewhat similar to the first, but different. The Deputy again asked Dispatch to run the name but again no hits. During the engagements with the occupants of the van, the Deputy could hear the occupants engaging in spirited conversations, all in Spanish.

Unknown to the Mexicans, Deputy Santiago speaks Spanish and had listened to their conversations. The van’s plates were run by dispatch and they came back as a different person than the driver. (So, no license, no registration, no insurance and the van is owned by somebody else…) To attempt to ID the driver, Colorado State Patrol was summoned as they have very sophisticated fingerprint readers in their vehicles.
After a bit a State Patrol Officer pulled up and they got the driver’s prints. As the fingerprint reader uses the internet to transmit the prints to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and there was no internet reception there, the State Patrol Officer had to briefly leave the scene to process the prints. Upon returning, it was revealed that the driver, Felipe Dejesus Cruz-Soltero, was an illegal alien, wanted in Colorado for “crimes of violence’ and was a “Revoked Habitual Traffic Offender”(RHTO). (In Colorado, if a person doesn’t have a driver’s license, and is convicted of a driving offense, he is assigned a Personal Identification Number (PIN) and the offense is logged to that. A person with RHTO status is one with a ton of infractions and can be arrested for that.)
FRECOM Dispatch was then asked to call ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency) o see if they would come and help identify the four illegals. Our local ICE responded that they would be sending somebody. At this point, there were three Custer County Deputies (Santiago, Dunbaugh and Evan Johnson) on the scene plus two State Patrol Officers in separate vehicles.
FRECOM also called Baltzly Towing to retrieve the Ford box van and move it to Custer County’s Impound lot.
After about 45 minutes, ICE showed up. Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR SUV’s come rolling in and four ICE agents exit. (Quite the entrance by ICE.) At 2:45 p.m. all four illegals were taken into custody by ICE. At the same time, Baltzly Towing showed up and loaded up the van to transport to our impound lot.
We asked Custer County Sheriff Rich Smith if he would give us a few minutes of his time to get some details about this event and he was gracious in doing so. We asked Sheriff Smith about the ICE response, and he gave an interesting answer. Sheriff
Smith was a Colorado State Patrol Officer for over 20 years. He said that he, and others, had often called ICE on illegals stops and they never responded or showed up. Sheriff Smith said he was very happy about the response this time and commented that if the stop had occurred a month ago (before Trump became President and unchained ICE), they probably would not have come.
Sheriff Smith said the Sheriff’s Office’s trained K-9 detected narcotics at the rear of the van but none were found.
The Sinister Twist
Sheriff Smith then said something that was a bit alarming. He noted that the registered owner of the van is a citizen of the country Yemen! And that he was recently deported! (Yemen is a bad, bad place with very bad people. Terrorism, drug running, sex trafficking, etc. One of the worst places in
the world.)
Folks, we had four Mexican illegals, at least one a violent offender, driving a box van owned by a deported Yemen national. Not a good combination. Right here in Happy Valley. Thank goodness Trump is President and is letting our national law enforcement agencies do their job.
We want to thank our Custer County Deputies on the scene for their outstanding, professional work during the stop and the investigation. FRECOM also did excellent. The FRECOM lady handling the incident was top notch. (The Sentinel folks listened in on our scanner for most of the incident.)
Good work Custer County Deputies. Thanks and God Bless.