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Returning Illegal Immigrants Strain On Enforcement
Updated: April 5th, 2006 10:12 AM EDT
JENNIFER TALHELM
Associated Press


U.S. marshals unlock the prisoners' leg shackles, body chains and handcuffs when green jungle and turquoise sea come into close view.

As the U.S. government's MD-83 airliner bumps to the ground at the small San Salvador airport, the 44 men and five women being deported home to El Salvador cheer. One man belts out a few bars of a Tom Petty song: "I'm free-ee...."

For a growing number of migrants picked up in the United States for immigration violations or criminal offenses, this is the way their American experience ends: a free flight home.

As Congress debates how to overhaul the nation's immigration system, the U.S. government is spending about $56 million to fly illegal immigrants home or to new locations within the U.S.

Last year, the government flew 60,000 people - mostly Central and South Americans - to their home countries for about $600 per person. An additional 35,000 were moved inside the U.S., mostly to be closer to the Mexican border in preparation for deportation.

Officials want to double the deportations in the next year as the U.S. ends its practice of freeing some illegal immigrants until they can be returned to their native countries.

Less than an hour after arriving in San Salvador, the men and women on this flight were led blinking into the tropical sunshine.

At the back of the line, two young men glanced around with curious expressions. They were teenagers when they left El Salvador. A decade later, their home country is now just a memory. Family members have grown, died or moved to the U.S.

In an interview the day before in a Florence, Ariz., detention center, one of the men, Antonio Medina, 28, summarized their situation. "I don't know what I'll do when I get there," he said through a translator. "When I get to El Salvador I'll decide."

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have collaborated since 1998 with the Justice Department, which flies U.S. prisoners throughout the country. But immigration officials are stepping up the number of flights as they come under increasing pressure to ensure all illegal immigrants caught in the U.S. are deported. An estimated 11 million immigrants live in the U.S. illegally.

Hundreds of captured immigrants are released each week and asked to return for a court hearing, a request many ignore.

The government hopes to end that practice on the Southwest border by Oct. 1 and across the rest of the country by next year. To do that, officials have been speeding up the timetable to deport foreigners who arrive without papers.

Scores of non-Mexican immigrants now need to be shuttled out of the country each week. Almost all Mexicans caught without papers in the U.S. are driven to the border by immigration officials and dropped off. Last year, that was almost 1 million people.

The people on this flight were caught because they committed crimes in the U.S.

Medina fought with his girlfriend and was arrested for domestic violence. Another, Jose Cabrera, was arrested six or seven times for auto theft, drug possession and other crimes.

The government doesn't keep statistics on how many of the deported immigrants return to the United States. There's almost no way of knowing unless they are picked up again, but officials guess there are many.

One man on the El Salvador flight told a guard he was on his third trip home this year. He earns $24 an hour working as a carpenter in the U.S., earning in one hour a little more than 1 percent of the average annual per capita income in El Salvador.

Many immigrants build lives in the U.S. and have reasons to return. Medina, for example, was injured on the job in California. He still has a claim against his employer and needs surgery to repair his knee.

A couple of years ago, he was picked up by immigration and deported for not having papers. He told officials he was Mexican, so they dropped him off across the border in Tijuana, south of San Diego. Within a year, he had found his way back into the United States.

Asked if he thinks he can come back illegally, Medina said in Spanish, "Es possible." It's possible.

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John Torres, acting director of the immigration agency's office of detention and removal, said that for now the best way to deal with the almost 1.2 million people who are caught in the U.S. illegally each year is to send them back as quickly as possible, as most are.

"The more people we arrest and the more people we return to their country serves as a deterrent to others thinking of coming," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security is pushing several countries to take back thousands of their citizens, with department Secretary Michael Chertoff saying Tuesday that a deal with China was near.

But some fear the government is denying migrants their rights in its rush to deal with a backlog of immigrants.

Immigrant advocates say some government screeners are not following regulations, and that some people with legitimate claims for asylum in the U.S. may be deported.

Foreign governments also struggle to absorb hundreds of their own citizens.

In El Salvador, returning migrants are placed in a "Welcome Home" program to help them find family and - if possible - a job.

Jorge Santivanez, that nation's immigration director, said Salvadorans leave because they can't find good jobs at home, so adding hundreds of new people to the economy poses a tremendous challenge. "Obviously, we can't compete (with the U.S.) with wages," he said.

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