An undocumented Gary father is facing deportation to Mexico after he was sentenced this week in a federal plea deal after legally admitting he scraped an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle while he tried to escape officers in October.
Rosario Carrillo Lopez, 54, was sentenced Wednesday to one year and one day after pleading guilty in April in the U.S. District Court in Hammond to assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.
He was on Clark Road returning from taking his son to high school at Gary Lighthouse Charter School on Oct. 13, records show, when three unmarked Homeland Security vehicles activated their emergency lights and attempted to box in Carrillo Lopez’s GMC Yukon. In a report filed with Gary Police, it says federal agents confirmed his identity, but he refused to get out of the car and fled in his vehicle, allegedly ramming one of the agent’s vehicles.
Carrillo Lopez has been in custody since October. He is expected to face deportation shortly after his release in a few weeks. He was ordered to pay about $3,800 in restitution.
Days after the traffic incident, immigration agents raided his Gary home at around 6 a.m. Oct. 23 where he lived with his wife Martha Ruiz, and three U.S. citizen children, Arnoldo, Sarai and Eli.
They arrested Carrillo Lopez, who was hiding on the roof over the back porch, plus his wife Martha, who was taken to an ICE facility in Texas before she was eventually released. She is in the process of applying for a green card, she said previously.
During the raid, Eli alleged he was thrown across the outside porch, hitting his head on a pole. His family later told him he was bleeding from his head. Arnoldo alleged that agents punched him, leaving him with a visible black eye days later. Their mother, like Sarai, is diabetic, was bitten by a police dog, they said previously.
They are also alleging agents threatened to “shoot” their father.
Court filings by defense attorneys alleged Martha was “dragged up the stairs by ICE or U.S. Marshals” after telling them she was “diabetic” and “needed to use the restroom.”
Arnoldo was released. Sarai was indicted for allegedly attacking a federal agent, which she denies. The case is pending. Eli spent two weeks in the Lake County Juvenile Detention Center. The teen’s case was dismissed in July, Arnoldo Carrillo said.
Attorney Robert Lewis, when reached by phone Friday, confirmed Eli’s court case is “over,” and could only say he was “satisfied” with how it ended.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Lupa argued Carrillo Lopez’s “choices” put “law enforcement” and “his family” in danger.
“That’s a shame,” he said.
Carrillo Lopez’s family flatly rejected this argument.
“My dad is not a man who likes conflict,” his daughter Sarai, now 25, wrote in a letter submitted to the court.
No ICE representatives attended the hearing.
In an unusual move, defense lawyer Roxanne Mendez Johnson asked U.S. District Judge Gretchen Lund to include an “addendum” to the presentence investigation report — part of a court paperwork file typically sent to prison — with “our version of events” for a “matter of completeness.”
Lawyers disagreed with the basic facts of what happened, she later said.
The “narrative that the government is spreading is simply untrue, and the physical evidence bears that out,” Mendez Johnson later said in an email Friday.
“It is true that Rosario fled from the scene and impeded the investigation of the deportation officers. While he fled, the side of his vehicle scraped the side of the deportation officers’ vehicle,” she wrote. “He fled because he was terrified for his life, and had been subjected to a dangerous pit maneuver where the officers struck his vehicle with their truck, and then blamed the impact on him.”
Carrillo Lopez was unwittingly “caught up” in immigration enforcement, the lawyer said in court. He likely popped up on ICE’s radar while he — a welder who owned a fencing company — was on a job in Gary Oct. 10 installing fencing in the back of the former Beckman Junior High School, 1430 W. 23rd Ave., which closed in 2005.
A “concerned” neighbor called the police, the lawyer said. A police officer checked his Mexican Consular Identification Card, then left.
Days later, court records show immigration agents were staking out his house and started tailing him while he was taking his son to school. As he headed back, they tried to arrest him, records show.
He “panicked” and “fled,” Mendez Johnson said in court; he was “genuinely afraid for his life.”
ICE originally accused him of “ramming” their vehicle, she told Lund. He “never intentionally” hit it, regretted “any contact was made at all,” and was “very glad no one was hurt.”
“Unfortunately, the same cannot be said” of the house raid, she said.
His wife, Martha, planned to go back to immigration court to appeal a denial to adjust her status, Mendez Johnson said. Rosario, the lawyer said, was “grateful” for his 25 years in the U.S.
In court, Carrillo Lopez said he was “very proud” of his “legacy.” His children were an “example.”
“Thank you for everything,” he said.
Lupa characterized the ICE stop akin to a “routine traffic stop” and alleged Carrillo Lopez “stepped on the gas,” and jumped a curb to take off.
He said Carrillo Lopez wanted to “shift the focus” to “other immigration cases” and “cherry picked” his case to “fit the narrative he feared for his safety.”
He was the one “who escalated what happened,” Lupa argued. If he had allowed himself to be arrested, he would have “probably been” in Mexico by the “end of October.”
Instead, he alleged the man started a “rampage” that morning in Gary trying to “escape from law enforcement,” Lupa said. “We do not live in the Wild West.”
Lupa noted he wasn’t “going to get into” the house raid, since daughter Sarai’s federal case is still pending.
Sarai, just above 5-foot-tall, and her lawyer John Cantrell have disputed the accusations.
The agents were “doing their jobs,” Lupa said in court.
Lupa acknowledged Carrillo Lopez “appears to be genuinely sorry.”
Mendez Johnson wrote previously in court filings that her client got three years on probation in a “transport/sell” drug case in 1996, and “was granted conviction relief” in July 2022.
Lund told lawyers “a lot has been said” about the “varied versions” in the presentence report. It was “best said in the plea agreement.”
During the hearing, Lund opted to add a year on supervised release after prison – typical in immigration cases – since it was not explicitly addressed in the plea agreement.
Carrillo Lopez had “much to be proud of,” Lund told him. “I wish you the best.” cq: hearing]
His family waved goodbye to him from the audience. On the way out, Ruiz, Carillo-Lopez’s wife, a caretaker for the elderly, thanked a reporter in English for attending the hearing.
In a press release sent to reporters on Friday, attributed to U.S. Attorney Adam Mildred, he said Carrillo Lopez “jeopardized the safety of law enforcement officers” and others, including “drivers,” “pedestrians,” and “schoolchildren” during a “high-speed chase.” In the police report filed on Oct. 13 by Homeland Security agents, it states that when Carrillo Lopez fled the traffic stop “they did not pursue” him “in accordance with their policies and procedures.”
In the predawn raid of Carrillo Lopez’s home, he “doubled down and put his own family in harm’s way, allowing them to physically confront agents while he bolted out the back door to escape a federal arrest warrant,” Mildred said in the statement. “Carrillo Lopez should consider himself lucky that a tragedy was avoided due to the disciplined and measured response by federal law enforcement agents.”
Mendez Johnson refuted the statement.
Her client’s “character is best spelled out by our (court filing), not the broad-brush, hyperbolic, often-misleading caricature in the government’s press release,” she wrote in an email on Friday.
A reporter sent detailed questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office — including why Mendez Johnson felt so strongly compelled to include a separate “version” of events and if that potentially raised questions on the credibility of the government’s account.
Other questions included whether ICE agents should have shown up to court to give their version of events in sworn testimony and whether federal prosecutors are vulnerable to political pressure — i.e. afraid of losing their jobs — from the Trump administration.
U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Morgan Swistek referred a reporter back to the press release.
“We do not have any additional comment,” she wrote.
Outside the courtroom on Wednesday, his son Arnoldo, who is a Project Specialist at Bible League International, said he just got married in late July and recently returned from his honeymoon. He was grateful that his dad had been about to connect on a video call to see some of the reception.
His father “raised three great children” and was “everything you would want in an American citizen,” he said.
When asked, Arnoldo noted no ICE representatives attended the hearing.
“It goes to show what their priorities are,” he said. “They can’t even show their face, not even in a courtroom.”
When asked for comment on the case, ICE representatives asked for Rosario’s birth date and A-number — which is assigned after an immigration arrest. When a reporter sent his federal legal case number, they didn’t reply further by deadline.
Ruiz, his mom, was “at peace” if she gets arrested going back to immigration court, Arnoldo said.
If that happens, they have made arrangements for Sarai, who is attending Ivy Tech Community College to become a pharmacy technician, to care for Eli.
