More illegal immigrants pegged in jail
Additional resources lead to increase in inmates identified for deportation
By Tony Biasotti
Friday, November 2, 2007

Federal agents are finding illegal immigrants in Ventura County's jails and identifying them for deportation twice as often as they did a year ago, and the pace could pick up even more when local officers join them next year.

Around 26 percent of the 1,700 or so inmates in Ventura County's jails are foreign-born, said Kathy Kemp, the Sheriff's Department chief deputy for detention services. There's no official count of how many are illegal immigrants, but when federal immigration authorities investigate the inmates' immigration status, they find that about 80 percent of the immigrants — 20 percent of the total jail population — are "removable." That means they're either illegal immigrants, or legal immigrants who have committed certain crimes that warrant deportation.

When federal authorities determine that an inmate is removable, the inmate is given a "detainer." Inmates with detainers are turned over to federal custody for possible deportation, once they're finished serving their jail sentences.

The detainers are issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since January, the agency has beefed up its Ventura County jail staff from two agents to five, with the fifth person joining last month, said Ray Kovacic, the assistant field office director for ICE in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

The results have been dramatic: From January through September of this year, ICE placed detainers on 725 inmates, Kovacic said, about twice as many as it did during the same period last year.

"They've definitely stepped it up," Kemp said.

Kemp said she expects to see the numbers pick up even more in 2008. In the spring, the Sheriff's Department plans to put two deputies on immigration duty in the jail. They'll be trained to investigate immigration status and place detainers just as the federal agents do.

Kovacic said he couldn't comment on Ventura County's specific plans until they've been cleared by the federal government, though he did say ICE would welcome more help from the local deputies.

"We enjoy an excellent working relationship with the Sheriff's Department," he said.

On Wednesday, two of ICE's top administrators met in Washington, D.C., with Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, and pledged their further support for efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the county's jails, according to a statement from Gallegly's office.

"Identifying criminal aliens is one of our top enforcement priorities, and it makes the most sense to do that while they're in jail," ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said. "They're literally a captive audience."

The jail screening program dates to a 1996 immigration law that Gallegly helped write, but it's only become a priority in Ventura County in the past few years.

Until this summer, agents were available to investigate immigration status during business hours only, so an immigrant who was arrested and released on the weekend might never be screened. Now, sheriff's deputies can call ICE agents in Orange County to run immigration checks on nights and weekends.

"Beyond being an immigration issue, this is a significant public safety issue," Kice said. "The community we're protecting is often the immigrant community, because the people we're removing are dangerous criminals who are often preying on other immigrants."

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