Thursday, March 12, 2009
Oakland sheriff wants faster deportations
Doing so before illegal immigrants serve time for crime would save taxpayers money, Bouchard says.
Paul Egan / The Detroit News

PONTIAC -- Enforcement actions against illegal immigrants housed in county jails have increased because of closer ties between federal authorities and local sheriffs, but more improvements are needed, officials said Wednesday.

Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard, who is president of the Major County Sheriffs' Association, said illegal immigrants convicted of property crimes should be deported immediately, not after serving their sentences in county jails as they are now.

"The taxpayers pay for that year in jail," Bouchard said. "As soon as they're convicted and we know they're illegal, let's deport them."

Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Detroit, said the agency's agreements with local sheriffs call for the federal agency to take custody of illegal immigrants once their local sentences are completed. Changing that would be a policy matter, he said.

The Oakland County Jail processes more than 25,000 prisoners a year. In the last 12 months, about 1,100 of those were found to be illegal immigrants.

La'Sal Austin, a supervisory detention and deportation officer with ICE, said the agency's Detroit office receives a daily prisoner list from county jails in Michigan and Ohio. Agents check those lists against a massive Department of Homeland Security database of immigrants with issues affecting their legal status, he said.

When matches are made, agents interview the prisoners, make sure ICE takes over custody when the immigrants leave jail, and arrange for deportations when appropriate, he said.

Enforcement has increased sharply since late in 2006, when the department's criminal immigrant program was shifted to the detention and removals office from the office of investigations, Austin said.

Nationally, ICE charged 221,085 immigrants under the program during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up from 164,296 the previous year, agency statistics show.

Deportations under the program declined during the same period, to 5,933 in 2008 from 11,292 in 2007. Walls said deportations spiked in 2007 to clear a backlog.

Statistics for 2006 were not available, he said.

Bouchard said the system could be further improved by providing a link between county jails and the ICE database.

When prisoners are booked into the Oakland County Jail and fingerprinted, State Police and the FBI immediately receive copies of those prints so they can check if they have any warrants out for the prisoners, but ICE doesn't get the fingerprints, Bouchard said.

Vincent Clausen, field office director of ICE detention and removal operations in Detroit, said the department is beginning to link to county jails, but "the federal government works more slowly than the counties do."

Harris County, Texas, is linked to ICE through a pilot project and Oakland County is on the list to join the pilot project, Clausen said.

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