ICE blunder frees suspected kidnapper — twice

MORRISVILLE, N.C. — When the Department of Homeland Security surged federal agents into North Carolina last November, they pledged to “target criminal aliens” and go after “the worst of the worst — including murderers, rapists, and pedophiles.”But in one case reviewed by Raw Story, federal immigration authorities received a tip about a 24-year-old Guatemalan national suspected of involvement in the kidnapping and rape of a 16-year-old girl — and they repeatedly missed the opportunity to detain him, despite him being in police custody.Federal immigration authorities appear to have learned about Maynor Godinez-Mendez when a detective with the Fuquay-Varina Police Department contacted the FBI’s Human Trafficking Division. When Godinez-Mendez was interviewed following his arrest on suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a federal Homeland Security Investigations agent was present and translated. Even after Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, received a notification from a detention officer that he was in a local jail, they still failed to take Godinez-Mendez into custody, and he was released on his own recognizance four hours later.The day after Godinez-Mendez’s release from jail, the Department of Homeland Security announced “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” Border Patrol “stormed” North Carolina’s largest city “in unmarked SUVs and masks, sweeping up hundreds of people,” as described in the Charlotte Observer. In the midst of the five-day blitz, the operation briefly expanded into the booming area about 150 miles to the northeast surrounding the state capitol of Raleigh, which includes Fuquay-Varina.Chafed by the agency’s fumbled response involving Godinez-Mendez, an ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations supervisor tasked a team with apprehending the suspect. But based on faulty intelligence, ICE staked out the wrong house. During an arrest operation on Dec. 2, 2025, agents in unmarked SUVs converged on a different man and blocked him at the entrance of a shopping center in Morrisville. When the man tried to back up and drive away, an agent rammed his car through a hedgerow, spun the vehicle around, and pushed it into a parked car.The driver was not Godinez-Mendez, but rather another Guatemalan. His name was Milton Roblero.When the agents took Roblero into custody, they determined that he had an outstanding order for deportation. Federal prosecutors charged him with forcibly assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and willfully damaging government property.Roblero’s lawyer filed a motion to dismiss, while questioning whether the agent who rammed his vehicle “violated ICE’s own policy and regulations restricting offensive driving techniques.” The shopping center includes a daycare, and the motion contends that ICE policy prohibits using offensive driving techniques “in school zones where children are present or going to or from school or where the danger to the public outweighs the enforcement benefit.” Your browser does not support the video tag. Surveillance video shows ICE ramming Milton Roblero's vehicle during his arrest in Morrisville, N.C. on Dec. 2, 2025. (federal courts) roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms The government did not directly address the question of whether ICE violated its policies, only saying in a court filing that the agents’ use of a vehicle for an administrative arrest was “appropriate.” But a filing in federal court on Monday indicates the government agreed to plead down the charges to a misdemeanor for impeding federal immigration officers’ traffic interdiction efforts. The agreement notes that Roblero will be removed to Guatemala following resolution of federal charges.Andreina Malki, the defense manager for the immigrant advocacy group Siembra NC, told Raw Story Roblero’s arrest fits a pattern of unsafe activity by ICE.“They used unmarked vehicles that don’t have any indication that they might be ICE,” she said. “If you’re a person driving, and unmarked cars try to block you in, you would probably try to leave. The fact that he got rammed and then got a charge for using his vehicle as a weapon — the story doesn’t add up. It’s not clear to the people being stopped who’s stopping them.”Lindsay Williams, an ICE spokesperson, told Raw Story he couldn’t speak to the specifics of Roblero’s arrest.A missing person case leads to a call to the FBI’s Human Trafficking DivisionThe circumstances that led to Roblero’s arrest began three weeks earlier with a missing person case that developed into a kidnapping and rape investigation.Police in Fuquay-Varina, a town on the southwestern fringe of Raleigh, received a frantic phone call from a woman who reported that her 16-year-old daughter was missing (Raw Story is withholding the girl’s name because she is a juvenile). According to the police investigative report obtained through federal court filings, the daughter had texted: “Mommy and Daddy, I’m sorry for doing this to you, and well, I’m not coming home.