AZ-Many deported felons just sneak back across border
Data: Many deported felons just sneak back across border
U.S. pushing prosecution, lengthy prison terms to deter re-entry
by Daniel González - Aug. 16, 2009 12:00 AM
The goal of the U.S. government's expanding program to rid the country of foreign-born criminals is clear: Find illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes and deport them so they no longer pose a threat to the public.
The government has successfully deported hundreds of thousands of foreign-born criminals in recent years. But a significant number have come back again, illegally, to the United States, often to commit more crimes, according to government data and interviews with law-enforcement authorities, federal prosecutors and criminal-defense lawyers.
There are no broad government statistics on how many deported criminals re-enter the United States illegally, but arrests by Border Patrol agents in the Tucson region alone suggest the number is high. In fiscal year 2008, 16 percent of the 317,696 immigrants arrested by agents in Tucson, one of nine sectors on the U.S.-Mexican border, were charged with felony counts of re-entering illegally, either because they had prior felony convictions in the U.S. or previously had been formally deported. Crossing the border illegally is typically a misdemeanor.The illegal re-entry of people who have been deported, especially those with criminal histories, represents one of the most vexing and persistent problems in the government's stepped-up effort to battle illegal immigration. The government doesn't have the resources to prosecute all of them, and in the past most were simply just deported again.
There is no easy answer, especially as authorities struggle with shrinking budgets and increasing responsibilities.
But now to deter re-entry, the government is beefing up efforts to prosecute violent criminals who come back to the country after they've been incarcerated and then deported, sentencing the most dangerous and egregious offenders to lengthy prison terms, rather than just automatically sending them back home.
The goal is to prevent deported criminals who re-enter the U.S. from committing more crimes and to deter others from re-entering, said Joseph Koehler, an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix who supervises a unit that prosecutes these cases.
The only way to deter violent criminals who get "formally kicked out of the country" and repeatedly return is to "make it very clear that there is a sanction for coming into the United States," Koehler said.
But even that is no guarantee that a criminal prosecuted for re-entering the country illegally, sent to prison and then deported again won't sneak back into the country.
"I'd say it happens fairly frequently," Koehler said. "It certainly is not the majority of the people we prosecute, but there are a significant number who do."
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that favors less immigration, said prosecuting deported criminals who return to the United States is effective at preserving public safety because it takes criminals off the street.
"These are not just people coming to work as bus boys," she said. "They are coming to return to a life of crime."
But, she said, it is difficult to say whether prosecuting deported criminals actually deters them or others from re-entering illegally.
"The only way to stop that is to have better security at the border," she said.
Atmore Baggat, a defense attorney who has represented immigrants charged with felony counts of illegal re-entry, said deported immigrants often return for jobs or because their spouses or children are still in this country, not necessarily to commit crimes.
He said many often do not realize the penalty for re-entry can be so harsh.
"I don't know how much the government impresses upon them the penalties for coming back," he said.
Federal officials say deportees are given plenty of warning, including a written statement that notifies them that re-entering the U.S. illegally is a federal offense that could cost them up to 20 years in prison.
Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C., said the United States has tried developing programs with other countries to integrate deported criminals into their homelands rather than just "dumping them at the border or kicking them off an airplane." But those efforts fell off following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said.
Rosenblum said, however, that countries are often reluctant to take in deported criminals.
"When you talk about real bad guys, they are not real attractive to take back," Rosenblum said.
He said there is strong public support for deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes and for prosecuting those who return. But, he stressed, studies have shown that illegal immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than people born in the United States.
The U.S. government is deporting more criminals than ever before.
In fiscal year 2008, ICE deported 369,221 people, 31 percent of whom had criminal records. The year before, 35 percent of the 291,060 people deported had criminal records.
Over the past two years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement also has greatly ramped up a program to identify illegal immigrants in the federal prison system and deport them. In fiscal 2008, ICE began proceedings to deport 46 percent more illegal-immigrant criminals than it did the previous year and 225 percent more than in fiscal year 2006, according to the agency's annual report.
Those numbers do not include the more than 78,000 illegal immigrants who have been placed in deportation proceedings over the past five years through a separate ICE program that trains state and local jail officials on how to identify inmates who are in the country illegally.
In Arizona, the number of people prosecuted for felony re-entry jumped 300 percent from 1997 to 2007, according to the Justice Department. Nationwide, prosecutions increased 150 percent during the same period.
Vincent Picard, an ICE spokesman in Phoenix, said the agency's Detention and Removal Operations has placed highest priority on those who "pose the most danger to our community," primarily illegal immigrants who have been convicted of violent crimes and major drug offenses.
From Jan. 1 through June 30 of this year, the ICE office in Phoenix had initiated 1,497 such cases, more than any other ICE office in the nation. The San Antonio office initiated the second-highest number, 997, and 96 percent of those cases were accepted for prosecution.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix, however, because of limited resour- ces, accepted less than half of the Phoenix cases, 659, according to ICE records.
Nationwide, ICE has initiated 9,954 cases through June 30; 6,462 were accepted for prosecution.
Koehler, the assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix, said the office can't keep up with all the cases, despite the addition of four prosecutors over the past year. As a result, the office focuses on the worst offenders, including deported immigrants with violent criminal histories and illegal immigrants who have re-entered multiple times.
"In a world of limited resources, you always have to prioritize your targets," Koehler said.
Illegal immigrants who aren't prosecuted are deported again. Koehler acknowledged that there is a chance some will return and commit more crimes.
"I think that there is always a class of people that is hard to deter from committing further crime," he said.
Republic reporter Dennis Wagner contributed to this article. Reach the reporter at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com
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