Thread: CA: Immigration officials identify more criminal undocumente

Thursday Nov. 12th
Immigration officials identify more criminal undocumented immigrants in jails
7:47 p.m. | Frank Stoltze | KPCC

The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Los Angeles said it’s identified a record number of criminal undocumented immigrants in local jails.

Immigration officials say they’ve identified more than 8,700 criminal undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles and Ventura County jails during the last two months.

They credit an initiative that allows local jail officials to check all inmates’ immigration status through a federal database.

"In the past, we used to have to manually screen booking records," said Tom Schiltgen of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But Schiltgen said agents were able to detain only the most serious criminal offenders because the agency lacks resources.

"With the resources, and particularly the available detention space we have, there's just no possibility to detain and remove all 8,700 of those."

Schiltgen said that of the undocumented immigrants identified, more than 1,000 were charged with or convicted of serious offenses including murder, robbery, and drug dealing.

www.scpr.org

Why not remove them all!With the milatary transport planes we have that are not oversea's we could probably ship a thousand a day out of the country.