Flip CT Red

A Guatemalan national sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting a child under the age of 16 was taken into federal custody at a Connecticut correctional facility last week — before the state could release him back into the public.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that Mario Ectali Lopez-Garcia was arrested on April 30 at the correctional facility in Enfield after much of his original sentence had been suspended by the court.

Let that sink in. A man convicted of sexually assaulting a child — a child younger than 16 — had the bulk of his sentence wiped away. He was days away from walking out of an Enfield prison and back into a Connecticut neighborhood.

ICE got there first.

This is exactly the scenario that open-borders advocates insist doesn’t happen. That ICE is a rogue agency targeting harmless people. That enforcement is cruelty. That Connecticut’s Welcoming City policies and resistance to federal immigration cooperation keep communities safer.

Mario Ectali Lopez-Garcia is the answer to that argument.

The question Connecticut residents should be asking their state legislators isn’t why ICE was at Enfield Correctional — it’s why the state court suspended most of a 20-year sentence for a convicted child predator in the first place, and why Connecticut’s own systems weren’t flagging this man for deportation proceedings the moment he was sentenced.

ICE didn’t fail here. Connecticut’s revolving door did. Federal agents just happened to be watching it spin.