Illegal alien prosecutions down in Nevada
STATE CONCENTRATES ON MORE SOPHISTICATED CASES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


RENO - Requests for criminal prosecutions of illegal immigrants dropped by two-thirds in Nevada from 2003 to 2004, partly because of the combination of the separate agencies of immigration and customs into the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.

"There's a lot of growing pains involved in two separate parts coming together," McGregor W. Scott, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California said. "It takes a while to work the bugs out."

Requests for criminal prosecutions for illegal immigrants by Homeland Security in Nevada dropped from 241 in 2003 to 83 in 2004, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse or TRAC, a data gathering, data research and data distribution organization associated with Syracuse University.

Criminal prosecutions, which can result in a prison sentence, are separate from the administrative immigration cases in which those suspected of being in the United States illegally have hearings to determine if they should be deported.

Those deportation hearings are on the rise in Nevada, according to Homeland Security figures. The 2,549 cases closed in Nevada through the first nine months of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 topped the 2,382 cases closed in the previous 12 months and 2,318 cases two years ago, Homeland Security figures show.

The decline in criminal prosecutions reflect Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement decision to take on more sophisticated criminal operations, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the division's eight Western states.

"If we don't take the time to prosecute these more complex immigration cases of people who are exploiting vulnerabilities in the immigration system, we will never make significant progress combating illegal immigration and the crimes associated with it,'' Kice said.

Examples of the more sophisticated cases include alleged efforts by two men in Reno to get green cards and Social Security cards for Bangladeshi people living in the United States, Kice said.

"Were trying to attack some of the criminal infrastructure that's perpetuating some of these problems," Kice said. "And people need to understand that some of these kinds of investigations can be very time consuming."

About 75 people booked into the Washoe County Jail in the past three months were on hold so their status could be reviewed in immigration court to determine if they should be deported, Kice said.

Nationally, there was a 65 percent increase in referrals from 2003 to 2004 due largely to a huge jump in cases in south Texas, according to TRAC data.


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