ICE agents arrested Vicente Torres-Vasquez at large on November 11 — nine days after Illinois paroled him four years early and let him walk out of the Stateville Correctional Center without telling ICE, even though a federal detainer asking the prison to hand him over was sitting in his file. Torres-Vasquez is the illegal alien from Mexico who killed U.S. Marine Corps veteran Gregory Errol Homola in a drunk-driving crash in 2011, and he now sits in ICE custody facing the deportation order that has stood against him since 2010.
Why it matters: the detainer system exists for exactly this handover — a deportable criminal finishes his sentence and passes straight from a prison cell to ICE, never touching the street. When a sanctuary state refuses and releases the man instead, the public carries the risk and federal agents have to hunt him down at large. In this case the man released had already been arrested four times for drunk driving, had entered the United States illegally three times, and was under a final order of removal — issued eight months before he killed Homola.
The Homeland Security Secretary’s own words state the charge plainly. "This illegal alien was sentenced to 25 years in prison after killing a man while drunk behind the wheel," Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. "When ICE lodged a detainer ahead of his release on parole, sanctuary politicians in J.B. Pritzker’s Illinois refused to cooperate with us and released him without notifying ICE." He added: "Thankfully, the brave patriots of ICE managed to arrest this killer anyway, and he will now be deported from our country. These heartless sanctuary politicians need to stop prioritizing political power over the safety of their constituents. They owe it to the Angel Families to work with us so that we can prevent any more American lives from being lost to illegal alien crime."
The killing happened on July 24, 2011, in Wauconda, Illinois. Torres-Vasquez, driving drunk — his blood alcohol level was 0.28, more than three times the legal limit — struck Homola, 55, who was riding his motorcycle. Two women in another vehicle were also injured, one of them pregnant. In 2012 he was convicted of aggravated driving under the influence resulting in the death of another person and two counts of aggravated driving under the influence resulting in great bodily injury, and DHS records his sentence as 25 years in prison. It was not his first time: he had previously been arrested four times for driving under the influence and convicted on three of those counts, and he had entered the country illegally at least three times in the mid-2000s. A final order of removal was issued against him in November 2010 — months before the crash that killed Homola.
The paper trail of the release is exact. On January 16, 2017, ICE lodged a detainer with the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, where Torres-Vasquez was held. On March 3, 2026, he was transferred to the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill in anticipation of his parole date, and ICE lodged another detainer there. On November 2, 2026, Stateville refused to honor it and released him on parole — four years ahead of his scheduled release date — without notifying ICE. The contrast is the whole story: the handover system was built so that a man like this moves from a cell to a deportation flight; Illinois chose the open door instead, and said nothing.
It took ICE’s Chicago Enforcement and Removal Operations team until November 11 to find and arrest him at large. ICE’s own post on the arrest was blunt: "The death of a U.S. Marine veteran was PREVENTABLE. Time and time again, sanctuary politicians disregard the safety of American citizens and release dangerous criminals back onto our streets." Illinois officials, for their part, have offered no public explanation of why the detainer was refused or why ICE was never told — no statement from the Governor’s office or the Department of Corrections accompanied the release, and none has answered DHS’s charges since.
The situation now: Torres-Vasquez remains in ICE custody pending removal proceedings, and the deportation that was first ordered in 2010 — before Gregory Homola was killed — is finally the next step. For Homola’s family, the Angel Family in this case, the arrest closes nine days in which the man who killed their Marine was free in the same state that had promised to keep him. What remains unanswered sits in Springfield: why a prison holding a twice-lodged federal detainer chose to open the door and keep silent.
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