Thread: Deported criminals slip back into U.S.

Long-term effectiveness of policies questioned
By Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metr ... eturn.html
September 17, 2007

By the time Jesús Ricardo Mendoza led police on a 90-mph chase down Interstate 215 in Riverside County two years ago, he had served four prison terms and had been deported four times already.


Mendoza, 33, had been convicted of assault, vehicle theft, drug possession and illegal entry. Although he had immigrated legally from Mexico as a child, he had since lost his legal status and been deported first through Nogales, Ariz., then twice through San Ysidro, then Calexico. Each time, he came back.

The federal government has stepped up efforts in recent years to deport immigrants with criminal records, sending agents to comb prisons and jails for deportable inmates in the name of national security.

But data from the Border Patrol suggest that such efforts may be misfiring. Thousands of previously deported criminals are caught trying to slip back into the United States, and it's likely thousands more return unnoticed. Those caught are eventually kicked out again, making for a revolving door of lawbreakers.

Between last Oct. 1 and the end of August, a federal database the Border Patrol uses to identify illegal crossers with U.S. criminal records yielded 17,553 hits nationwide for violent and drug-related offenses.

Each hit represents an offense rather than an individual, said Lloyd Easterling, a spokesman for the agency in Washington, D.C., meaning that a person with two recorded offenses can show up as two hits.

Still, he said, the data provide an idea of how often deported criminals try to return to the United States. In fiscal year 2006, when 88,970 people with criminal records were deported, the Border Patrol logged more than 69,000 hits for prior offenses – excluding immigration violations – among the 1.1 million illegal border crossers arrested nationwide.
Last year, 72 percent of the immigrants with criminal records who were deported were Mexicans, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With the exception of a small number flown to the interior of Mexico, most were simply taken to ports of entry such as San Ysidro and sent through the pedestrian gate.

Officials in Tijuana and other border cities have long complained about problems created by an out-of-town criminal element deposited at their doorsteps. The flip side is that much of this floating population eventually makes its way back north. The incentive is especially strong for those who have spent much of their lives in the United States.

In San Diego, Border Patrol agents are accustomed to chasing down recently deported convicted criminals.

Some try to jump the border fence just a few dozen yards east of the port of entry. Others make their way back through East County, where ranchers find rocks on their property sprayed with gang graffiti and agents routinely encounter deported felons, some so fresh out of prison they're still wearing flimsy jail-issued sneakers.

“We pulled over a van, and two of them handed us their California corrections department cards as ID,â€

This is something that happens all too often. There was a Mexican in Hollywood, Florida who was deported in February and returned within a month. He was living with others in an apartment got into a fight and fatally stabbed one of his roommates and attacked the other one who tried to stop him. This happened in April in the same year.