Thread: How Criminals Dodge Deportation

How criminals dodge deportation
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
BY BRIAN DONOHUE
Star-Ledger Staff
Alejandro Rivera Gamboa, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, was arrested four times on drunken driving charges in Oregon. But until police charged him last week with choking the life from a 15-year-old girl, immigration authorities had never heard his name.

Juan Lizcano had at least two run-ins with the law in Texas. Both went unnoticed by immigration officials until Lizcano, who entered the country illegally in 2001, was charged with killing Dallas Police Officer Brian Jackson in 2005.

In New Brunswick, Ricardo Cepates, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, already had an outstanding deportation order when he was arrested for holding a knife to a woman's throat in 1998. But he, too, fell through the cracks and was released. In 2004, he was convicted as a serial rapist who had terrorized a large swath of the city for two years.

For many Americans, it is an article of faith that an illegal immigrant sitting in jail on criminal charges will soon be deported. Indeed, federal law dictates that people in the United States unlawfully be sent back to their homelands if they're convicted of crimes.

But in the nation's overwhelmed and disjointed immigration system, that is hardly the case.

Thousands of times each year, local police, jail officials and prosecutors simply do not notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they have a suspected illegal immigrant in custody.

Even when ICE is contacted and the detainee is ordered removed from the country, deportation isn't a sure thing.

In a report issued last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General projected that 302,500 immigrants will be jailed in county or state lockups this year. Most will go free rather than face deportation, even if they have been convicted of a crime, the auditors found.

The report described a system so riddled with holes and lacking in manpower and jail space that it had effectively become "an unofficial mini-amnesty program for criminals and other high-risk aliens."

As the Oregon, Dallas and New Brunswick cases illustrate, many of those criminal immigrants have gone on to commit more crimes.

The system was thrust into the spotlight again earlier this month when José Lachira Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, was named as one of six suspects, now all in custody, in the Newark schoolyard killings of three college students. (Another suspect, Rodolfo Godinez from Nicaragua, obtained legal permanent residency in 2001.)

Carranza, 28, had been arrested three previous times in Essex County in the past year -- one for a bloody bar brawl and two in connection with a single child rape case.

ICE officials said none of the half-dozen agencies that encountered Carranza notified them.

"The average person would expect that criminals would be detained and removed, and they are shocked when something like this happens," said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research institute that favors lower immigration levels.

"It's a chicken-and-egg thing," Vaughan said. "The state and local agencies don't know how to screen or when they should. And when they do, ICE will often not come get them. So they've stopped calling."

Adding to the problem, Congress continues to expand the range of crimes for which legal immigrants can be deported, making ICE's workload even larger, said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE's predecessor agency.

"You almost have to have immigration people in every local jurisdiction, and that's just not realistic," said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.


TO CONTACT OR NOT CONTACT

In the town of Williston, Vt., near the Wal-Mart and Home Depot, sits a nondescript office building with scores of workers seated in cubicles -- computers humming 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

They are officers with U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement, taking calls and electronic inquiries from law enforcement agencies that have arrested either a suspected illegal immigrant or a legal immigrant whose crimes make him or her deportable.

The office, ICE's Law Enforcement Support Center, gets 700,000 inquiries a year from across the country. There are several dozen people on duty on a typical day.

Roughly 42 times a day, officers who have run a computer background check will place on a suspect a "detainer" -- a notice instructing local authorities to hold a criminal until federal agents can take him or her away for deportation.

As Carranza wound his way through Essex County's criminal justice system in his three arrests before the Newark slayings, he came in contact with a half-dozen agencies that could have contacted the Vermont office. None did, according to ICE officials.

Collectively, the explanations the agencies have given represent a snapshot of the hodgepodge of local policies that determine how local authorities interact with ICE -- or why they don't interact at all.

In West Orange, where Carranza was arrested Oct. 21, 2006, following a bar room brawl, police Chief James Abbot said it is up to the supervisor on duty to decide whether to contact ICE about an arrest.

If it's a serious offense, or if the person presents documents that are obviously false, the supervisor might call. Or not.

"There's no bright-line rules when you notify immigration," Abbot said.


CUTTING THROUGH ALIASES

After Carranza was arrested following a fight at Huguito's Restaurant and Bar in West Orange, Abbot said, the suspect spent only a few hours in a holding cell before he was taken to the Essex County Jail.

"So it was incumbent on Essex County" to check Carranza's immigration status, Abbot said.

But checking that status is hardly a priority at the Newark facility, where 37 classification officers struggle to process background checks and paperwork on about 80 new inmates a day, or 27,000 every year. Some of those inmates, with rap sheets that run for pages, have dozens of aliases and identities to be sorted out. Many spend just a few hours in a cell before they are released on bail.

Rarely, if ever, do officers check a suspect's immigration status or contact ICE for a lookup, said Scott Faunce, Essex County's director of public safety, whose office runs the jail.

"If I gave them 27,000 names with multiple identifiers, I don't know if immigration has the wherewithal to manage that," said Faunce.

However, Faunce said, ICE has recently begun asking Essex County for a list of foreign-born inmates. Most recently, they asked for the list on July 19. Faunce said his office faxed a list of approximately 30 inmates over to ICE the next day.

When ICE staff arrived July 26 to interview those on that list half of the inmates had already been released from jail, he said.

"Because of the lag time and amount of inmates processed in and out, there's a good portion that are released," said Faunce.

The Essex County Prosecutor's Office, too, is drowning in cases. On any given day, judges work through a long list of defendants awaiting arraignments, plea hearings or trials. Paul Loriquet, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, said his agency notifies immigration authorities only after a suspect has been convicted.

In Newark, where Carranza had been arrested on child rape charges in May, the policy appears more clear-cut.


GUIDELINES BEING WRITTEN

As in many cities in New Jersey and elsewhere, police in Newark have long resisted taking a greater role in immigration enforcement.

Officials note that detectives investigating robberies, rapes and murders in immigrant communities already are struggling to develop informants among a population fearful of the police. Adopting the role of immigration cops would make that job even tougher and allow criminals to go free and commit even more crime, they say.

"I do not want to create a chill in my community where people are afraid to come forward to police and report crimes," Mayor Cory Booker said last week. "Undocumented immigrants and immigrants within our city are an important part of our fabric. And my police department, it is not their role or responsibility."

For towns unsure what tack to take, the state has provided little guidance.

The state Attorney General's Office is just now writing guidelines to spell out how local police should interact with immigration authorities.

And in the wake of Carranza's arrest, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie urged New Jersey's 21 county prosecutors to develop a consistent statewide policy to notify federal authorities about illegal immigrants they've arrested.

"You have three dead kids in Newark, so obviously we failed," Christie said. "There has not been a constant policy to let us know about these folks. We're ready, willing and able to help them on this, but we need to be in the loop because we cannot detain someone who we don't know about."

There are some indications of improving cooperation.

In the first 11 months of the current fiscal year, New Jersey law enforcement officials and agencies have lodged 9,363 inquiries with the ICE office in Vermont, more than 2,000 above the previous year, ICE spokesman Michael Gilhooly said.

Even so, some departments have simply stopped calling because, they say, it's pointless.


RARE VISITS

Again and again, veteran cops recount stories of calling ICE (or INS before it), only to be told the agency lacked the manpower to come pick up illegal immigrants.

"Back to when I was a patrolman, I've never, ever seen them come out," said Abbot, the West Orange police chief. "In 27 years, I've never seen it happen."

Abbot's assertions are backed up by government reports and reams of statistics that show ICE badly lacking the manpower to detain and deport criminal aliens moving through the nation's prisons and jails.

Picking up a criminal for deportation entails far more than just sending out an agent to act as chauffeur.

Deportation officers often must visit the jail and interview the suspect, find detention space in the overflowing federal system, and usher the suspect to court for a deportation hearing. Often they also must negotiate with the suspect's foreign consulate to get the suspect a passport.

That labor-intensive job falls to ICE's chronically understaffed Criminal Apprehension Program. In 2006, just 261 officers were assigned to the program nationwide. The Inspector General's Office determined it would take 1,008 additional officers to ensure all deportable criminals are removed from the United States.

In New Jersey, those manpower shortages have largely limited the agency to checking state and federal prisons for deportable immigrants, said Scott Weber, the Newark field office director for ICE's Office of Detention and Removal.

Auditors found the agency also would need $1.1 billion and 34,653 more beds -- the equivalent of 18 East Jersey State Prisons -- to detain and deport the criminal immigrants in county jails and prisons nationwide.

In New Jersey, ICE has one federal detention center in Elizabeth and rents space in county jails across the state, including in Hudson, Bergen, Middlesex and Monmouth counties.

Staffing figures for ICE are secret. But Weber said he has seen his staff double in the past year, enabling him to begin screening inmates in some county jails.

And he hopes cases like Carranza's will spark greater cooperation between his office and law enforcement officials in Essex County and other parts of the state.

"I'm anxious to get together with them and talk about it," Weber said. "I'm sure we can work out something better."

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf ... thispage=6

Staff writers Jeff Whelan, Jeffery C. Mays, Jonathan Schuppe, William Kleinknecht and Mark Mueller contributed to this report. Brian Donohue may be reached at bdonohue@starledger.com or (973)392-1543.

I think it's about time to enforce and change laws to immediately demand ICE pick illegals up and start deportation!

We also have to build the FENCE, go after employers who hire illegals, secure our ports and start an EXIT VISA PROGRAM!

It's what America want to here from a Presidential candidate!

I think it's about time to enforce and change laws to immediately demand ICE pick illegals up and start deportation!

A good start would be to add to the number of ICE agents. Each state should have an adequate number of agents to respond to local authorities when they take suspected illegals into custody. It should also be mandantory that state, county and local law enforcement train under 287g.
If no jail space is available, criminal illegals can then be chained to the nearest pole, tree, whatever until ICE responds.

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