Local police, prosecutors don't worry whether suspects are illegal immigrants
BY STEVEN MAYER, Californian staff writer
e-mail: smayer@bakersfield.com | Saturday, May 24 2008 6:19 PM

Last Updated: Friday, May 23 2008 6:19 PM

When convicted murderer Juan Dedios Burboa was sentenced Monday to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the residents of California were sentenced, too, in a way.
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Nationwide, ICE charged more than 164,000 convicted criminals with immigration violations last year.

Of those, approximately 95,000 immigrants with criminal histories were deported.

But that’s only a fraction of the total. The agency estimates that 300,000 to 450,000 convicted criminal aliens who are deportable are detained each year at federal, state and local prisons and jails.

ICE doesn’t break out statistics specific to Kern County, but in fiscal year 2007, the agency took action against more than 18,000 criminal aliens in Northern California, including Kern County.

This fiscal year, those numbers are on track to significantly surpass last year’s, said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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The 29-year-old is a Mexican national, yet the entirety of his prison sentence — some 40 years if he lives to age 70 — will be served out in California prisons at the expense of California taxpayers.

Burboa was convicted in Kern County Superior Court for plotting to kidnap and kill a trio of Mexican drug runners and steal their shipment of crystal methamphetamine.

One of the drug runners was shot to death.

Even as the Golden State reels under a massive budget crisis fueled in part by a burgeoning prison population, there are tens of thousands of criminal aliens serving time on California’s dime.

Exactly how many are there? No one knows for sure.

Gordon Hinkle, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the department does not know how many illegal immigrants are housed in the state’s prisons. They don’t ask inmates whether they are undocumented.

They do ask new prisoners what country they were born in, Hinkle said, but they don’t concern themselves specifically with the immigration status of convicts.

The situation is similar at the local level.

“We have no idea how many of our inmates are undocumented,â€