http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/spe ... 42481.html

Oct. 8, 2006, 11:40AM
Getting a handle on illegal immigrant crime difficultNumbers are sketchy, but some experts agree group adds strain

By PEGGY O'HARECopyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

The slaying of Houston police officer Rodney Johnson by a Mexican national who returned here after being deported has cast another uncomfortable spotlight on the estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants living in the Greater Houston metropolitan area.
Making up about 10 percent of the area's population, this demographic — alternately scorned as freeloaders and defended as hard workers seeking better lives — accounts for 7 percent to 9 percent of those caught up in the local criminal justice system as inmates or defendants.
While various agencies acknowledge such statistics are incomplete, the numbers nonetheless indicate that immigrants living here without authorization have an impact on Harris County's courts and jails, as well as the state's prisons.
Even a single-digit assessment of 7 percent to 9 percent of the people flowing into the doors of these various entities can involve thousands of people and millions of dollars each year.
"I believe it has created a tremendous burden on the criminal justice system," said U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, who hosted a congressional subcommittee hearing on the immigration controversy in Houston six weeks ago. "Any percentage of illegal aliens coming in the United States with a criminal history is unacceptable, whether it's 1 percent or 10 percent. All you have to do is talk to the family of Rodney Johnson to verify that."
Still, academics who have studied the immigrant population for years caution against making sweeping judgments of a vast population segment they say is unfairly suffering public wrath for the actions of a few.
With the number of deportations at an all-time high, they question critics' assessment of how Houston should control this burgeoning population.
"The laws are very tough already. I'm not sure there needs to be a toughening-up of the laws," said Joseph Vail, director of the University of Houston Law Center's Immigration Clinic, which represents indigent migrants in immigration matters.
"There may need to be a more effective use of the laws. But the laws already are very tough, and they've been that way since 1996," he said, referring to the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which vastly expanded the number of offenses that can lead to deportation.
While Vail questions how accurate the estimated numbers of illegal immigrants might be, he understands the volatility surrounding the issue, especially considering the recent outrage over Johnson's death.
"Any alien who's here unlawfully and is arrested or convicted of a crime and has to be incarcerated at taxpayer expense is a burden," Vail said.
Costing millions of dollarsA paucity of statistics makes it difficult to assess how much impact illegal immigrants actually have on public safety and the criminal justice system.
But the inmate populations in the Harris County Jail and state prisons — and the nearly 81,000 defendants referred to the county's local Pretrial Services each year — offer some clues.
According to testimony from Harris County sheriff's Maj. Michael O'Brien at a recent U.S. House subcommittee hearing hosted by McCaul in Houston, the Sheriff's Department spent more than 15 percent of its budget in the most recent fiscal year to investigate, arrest, process, incarcerate and provide medical care to illegal immigrants.
At the time, O'Brien testified, this amounted to more than $41 million, but sheriff's officials said Friday that the actual cost attributed just to those who willingly admitted to being in the U.S. illegally was probably closer to $28 million.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, meanwhile, estimated it cost $132 million to incarcerate illegal immigrants in its prisons during the 2005 fiscal year, according to testimony given by a TDCJ official at McCaul's hearing.
Both agencies recovered only a fraction of the money spent through a federal grant program designed to help state and local governments with the costs of incarcerating the undocumented.
Under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice, Texas' state prison system recovered more than $18.5 million — just 14 percent of what it spent locking up undocumented immigrants in its facilities that year.
The Harris County Sheriff's Department, meanwhile, recovered about 10 percent of its costs from the same federal program — or about $2.7 million — which left the rest of the bill to be shouldered by taxpayers.
Harris County received the second-highest payment of any governmental agency in Texas, second only to the prison system.
Records provided by the federal funding program show Harris County locked up 972 illegal immigrants for at least four days in its jail facilities throughout the fiscal year, along with 3,104 other inmates whose immigration status was unknown. Those who spent less than four days in jail weren't counted.
Courts feel impact, tooThe Texas prison system, meanwhile, incarcerated 7,863 undocumented migrants in that same time period, along with 3,852 more inmates whose immigration status remained in question.
A survey of the state prison system's total population on May 31 revealed that nearly 7 percent of the inmates — 10,376 people — said they were foreign citizens, said TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.
Slightly more than 4 percent of those locked up in state prisons at that time — 6,612 inmates — have been ordered turned over to federal immigration authorities' custody once they finish serving their state sentences at TDCJ, Lyons said.
Undocumented immigrants also have an impact on Harris County's courts. About 16 percent of those defendants interviewed by Harris County Pretrial Services last year — almost 13,000 of the nearly 81,000 questioned — reported they were not U.S. citizens, said director Carol Oeller.
More than 7,500 of those defendants — about 9 percent of all those interviewed — acknowledged they came here without authorized documentation, Oeller said.
That latter percentage is not much of a change from years past, she said.
Pretrial Services officers do not seek to enforce immigration laws or alert federal authorities of an undocumented immigrant's presence, Oeller said.
"During the course of a defendant interview, we ask, 'Are you a U.S. citizen?' If they say no, the officer will say, 'What documents do you have to be in this country?' We don't see the papers," Oeller said. Based on their answers, defendants are recorded in the court files as legal residents, undocumented immigrants or guests with visas or work permits.
"From our perspective, there are Supreme Court and lower court case laws that say someone who is a non-U.S. citizen is entitled to the same due process as a U.S. citizen," she said.
Years-long debateOne of the country's leading experts on the undocumented-immigrant population's size estimates there are nearly 400,000 such people living in the Greater Houston metropolitan area — making up about 10 percent of the total population.
Jeffrey Passel, a senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., estimated that 11.1 million undocumented immigrants were living in the U.S. in March 2005. He concluded that Texas ranked second among states having the most undocumented immigrants, estimating 1.4 million to 1.6 million lived in the Lone Star State at that time.
While such numbers will always be subject to debate, academics and politicians say the undocumented-immigrant population likely will remain an explosive issue for years to come.
"Illegal immigrants are the Willie Horton of the 2006 elections," said criminologist Ramiro Martinez, a visiting scholar who recently arrived at the UH Center for Mexican American Studies to research how Latinos impact Houston crime.
(Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a woman while on furlough from prison, was the focus of a controversial political ad during the 1988 presidential campaign.)
Despite the numbers, Martinez expects to find Latino homicides and violent crimes are lower than expected in areas of Houston having large immigrant populations.
That's because studies across the country have shown the number of immigrants in a community rarely influences the level of crime — and indicate areas with high concentrations of immigrants are safer, he said.
peggy.ohare@chron.com