By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Those attractive Israelis you may see at the mall, hawking colorful beauty and hair products from the Dead Sea, may not be as innocuous as they seem.
Many are in the U.S. illegally, working in violation of their tourist visas, and the Department of Homeland Security has taken notice. In early December, 12 Israelis were rounded up in Kennewick, in Eastern Washington; one, Yuval Oran, remains in detention and has been charged with harboring illegal aliens while the other 11, including Oran’s sister, have posted bond and are expected to testify against him. A few, citing financial hardship, will be able to return home once they provide video depositions, according to court documents obtained by JTNews.
“They’ve turned the workers into witnesses,” said Chaplain Gary Friedman, executive director of Seattle-based Jewish Prisoner Services International, which has been providing services to the Israelis while in custody.
Around the same time, a smaller number of Israelis in the Seattle/Tacoma area were also arrested by federal agents.
They are being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Northwest Detention Center near Tacoma, and will face a judge at the immigration court who will decide if they should be deported.
Lorie Dankers, a public affairs representative at the regional ICE office confirmed that “some individuals have been taken into custody,” but did not release their names.
The Israelis who manage these mall kiosks — most are here legally as dual citizens or resident aliens — say they are running franchise businesses. However, Friedman believes they are a network of con men who entice young Israelis fresh out of the army or school with the promise of making a lot of money in a short amount of time — and minimal consequences if they’re caught.
“Some of these guys are really bad, some of them are just bad, there might be a handful of them who are decent people,” Friedman said, “but by and large they’re con men.”
The consequences, as the arrested Israelis are finding out, are not as minimal as advertised.
“If a person was ordered removed, which is a deportation order, there’s a 10-year ban from returning to the United States legally, with very, very few exceptions,” Dankers said. Should anyone arrested choose to leave the country voluntarily, the penalty can be much lighter, but every case is different, Dankers cautioned.
The Israelis working at the kiosks know what they’re getting themselves into, and the situation is far from anything resembling human trafficking, Friedman said. The ringleaders who bring them in rent comfortable apartments and supply computers and cars. They have the freedom to move around and — most importantly — can leave whenever they wish.
The problem, Friedman said, is that they don’t want to.
“They can make in three months here what they can make in three years in Israel,” Friedman said the organizer of one such group told him.
“It’s real easy for them to recruit these people,” Friedman said. “The ones that got arrested in Kennewick, most of them were from one moshav…. They’ll see all the money [others are] wiring back, [and ask], ‘How do I get in on this?’ — and it is a lot of money.”
He said that in addition to employing illegal workers, some have been implicated in drug dealing and credit card fraud.
Friedman spoke to one of the kiosk managers earlier this month as they cleared out a Tukwila apartment that had been vacated by about 15 Israelis. The fact that so many of these Israelis left so quickly means the attention from DHS is having an effect.
“What that tells me is that they’re responding to the crackdown by getting their people out of here,” Friedman said.
Gideon Lustig, Israel’s deputy consul general to the Pacific Northwest, said he wouldn’t classify the Israelis’ arrests as a problem, but admitted that “we are concerned about the growing number of Israelis working illegally in Washington State.”
Once the Israelis are arrested, they are held and released on bond, and then generally ordered deported. If they waive their right to appeal, then the American and Israeli authorities coordinate on obtaining travel documents, and within four to six weeks they’re escorted onto a flight home.
“We try to expedite that, absolutely, because these people are being detained at taxpayers’ expense,” said Dankers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An article in Israel’s Yediot Achronot newspaper, with a photo of the Seattle skyline splashed across the page, reported on the arrests in Kennewick and Seattle, cautioning others against doing the same.
Similar arrests have also been made recently in Texas, the article said.
Lustig said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been working with authorities in the state, but has refrained from attempts to impose any influence on behalf of the detainees.
“These people are responsible for their actions, and we have been working closely with the Washington authorities, who are very cooperative and communicative with us,” Lustig said. “We are trying to communicate these issues back to people in Israel so they would know what might be the consequences of their doing this, but we are not getting legally involved, as this is the law of the state.”
The ministry has, mainly through Jewish Prisoner Services, been working to provide kosher food and shelter to the released detainees. Given Friedman’s small budget, it’s all he is able to handle despite pleas from their families in Israel who would want JPSI to post bond, pay attorneys’ fees, or purchase airline tickets.
“We don’t have the money. But what happens is…these families will call from Israel,” Friedman said. “They’ll expect that the Jewish community here, via me, is going to bail their kids out…. It really is stressing our resources, which are really limited.”
But worse than the financial toll these Israeli workers are taking, Friedman said he worries about the way their actions reflect on the Jewish community.
“Obviously the immigration authorities are not thinking very highly of Israelis these days, and I hate to see that because it reflects on Jews and Israel,” Friedman said. “Not just Israelis, but Jews in general.”