Old Orchard Beach Police Department reserve officer Jon Luke Evans, a Jamaican native, was arrested by ICE on July 25 after allegedly attempting to purchase a firearm illegally. The arrest set off a feud with the police department, which claimed it had done an extensive background check and was told by the Department of Homeland Security that he was cleared to work. On Monday, WMTW reported that he reached an agreement with the government to depart the U.S. voluntarily to avoid a deportation order.
Evans entered the U.S. on Sept. 24, 2023, slated to stay only a week, but he hadn’t boarded his departure flight.
After he was arrested last month, ICE publicly blasted the OOBPD for hiring him.
“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 Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde said in a statement.
The OOBPD fought back, with Police Chief Elise Chard saying that Evans’s information had been submitted through the DHS’s E-Verify program, which had cleared him. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin bashed the town’s “reckless reliance” on E-Verify in a statement.
“Usage of E-Verify does not absolve employers of their legal duty to verify documentation authenticity, and all employers should take necessary steps to effectively verify legal employment status,” she said.
However, in the same statement, she defended E-Verify as a proven system with “high accuracy in verifying work authorization by cross-checking employee documents against government databases to combat rampant document fraud and protecting American workers.”
Chard accused McLaughlin of undermining “public trust and confidence in municipal law enforcement,” questioning the efficacy of E-Verify if it had cleared Evans.
“Simply stated, had the federal government flagged his information, the town would not have hired Mr. Evans,” Chard said. “Any insinuation that the town and department were derelict in our efforts to verify Mr. Evans’ eligibility to work for the town is false and appears to be an attempt to shift the blame on to a hard-working local law enforcement agency that has done its job.”
ICE SWAMPED WITH 100,000 APPLICATIONS IN TWO WEEKS SINCE ANNOUNCING HIRING BLITZ
The Washington Examiner reached out to McLaughlin for further comment and clarification.
Evans’s situation parallels that of Gratien Milandou Wamba, an illegal resident of Maine who ICE arrested after allegedly illegally attempting to purchase a firearm while working as a corrections officer.
