Legislators look to fix flaws in illegal immigration database

Monday, Jun. 13 by Matt Vecchio

A May 28 malicious wounding in Sterling Park led to the arrest of two men believed to be in the country illegally, reopening the debate of illegal crime in Loudoun and the effectiveness of the deportation process.

Two tragic stories, especially, come to mind — the Salvador Portillo-Saravia case in December 2010 that led to the rape of an 8-year-old girl, and the Arnold Mancia-Morales case in 2009 resulting in a violent assault and rape.

In both events, the criminals were in the United States illegally and had previously been deported — supposedly — but in their cases, the system didn’t work.

Congressman Frank Wolf (R-10th) is now targeting why.

Systematic

When U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, rolled out its shiny new Department of Homeland Security program called Secure Communities in October 2008, Virginia State Police immediately jumped onboard — signing up the entire state by 2009.

The new, controversial, program was designed to identify immigrants brought into U.S. jails who are deportable under immigration law. The primary method of identification is submitting the arrestees’ fingerprints to criminal and immigration databases — allowing ICE access to information on individuals held in participating jails.

To avoid racial profiling, jails profile all those arrested, not solely those suspected of illegal status. If there is a match, ICE is tipped off and can handle the next step in the deportation process.

ICE reported that as of Sept. 30, 2010, 4,204,862 fingerprint submissions resulted in 343,829 database matches. As a result of Secure Communities, ICE removed 64,072 persons up until that time.

But apparently, there’s a loophole. And Portillo-Saravia stumbled right into it.

There and back

Portillo-Saravia, a member of Hispanic gang MS-13, was charged with raping and sodomizing and 8-year-old at her home in Fairfax in late December 2010. But Portillo-Saravia, of El Salvador, shouldn’t have been stateside in the first place. He was originally deported in 2003.

He snuck back in, a federal offense, but the story doesn’t end there. Just four short weeks before the sexual attack on the 8-year-old, Loudoun County Sheriff’s deputies picked up Portillo-Saravia and dropped him in a Loudoun County jail on public intoxication charges.

This should have been when the Secure Communities program kicks in — as authorities ran his prints through a federal database. Despite his previous deportation; however, nothing was found and Portillo-Saravia was released after 12 hours in the slammer.

And in comes the loophole.

At the time, ICE officials told the Washington Post that many people who were deported prior to 2005 are not in the fingerprint database. A source told the paper that Secure Communities is not a magic solution, and it shouldn’t be perceived as such.

Fingerprints before 2005 were taken by placing fingertips, stained with ink, on a card. Now, ICE takes them electronically — and has built a database of fingerprint information for nearly 100 million people.

According to ICE, more than 751,000 people were deported from 2001 until 2005, Portillo-Saravia among them, which indicates there may be many similar cases of the system failing out there.

Portillo-Saravia was eventually tracked down in Houston, Tx. and was extradited to Virginia, but the problem still lingers.

“I was surprised,â€