Rep. Sandy Adams battles feds over immigrant criminals

By Mark K. Matthews, Washington Bureau

6:35 p.m. EST, November 19, 2011

WASHINGTON — The stories are horrific: a Fort Myers policeman gunned down in 2008 by a Cuban convict freed from U.S. detention because he couldn't be deported. A New York City woman attacked and eviscerated last year by a Chinese immigrant criminal also free because he couldn't be sent back to his homeland.

U.S. Rep. Sandy Adams of Orlando, a former Orange County deputy, has seized on these stories as evidence of what she deems a deadly loophole in U.S. immigration policy: a decade-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says the U.S. cannot indefinitely detain immigrant criminals whose home country refuses to take them back.

"We have American citizens being harmed," said Adams, a freshman Republican who has made the issue a front-burner concern, using it to grill Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano and as fodder for a stinging newspaper essay.

"At the end of the day, criminal immigrants are going back into the community, and they are going back to commit really heinous crimes," she said.

But officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — while acknowledging the murders — say the problem represents a fraction of the cases they handle annually.

The people Adams is talking about — mostly criminals released from immigration detention centers after serving jail or prison time for their crimes — totaled a bit fewer than 13,000 during the past three years. By comparison, the U.S. in 2010 deported nearly 400,000 immigrants, about half of them convicted criminals — a rate that ICE called a one-year record.

"These releases are a very small part of what we do," said a senior ICE official not authorized to speak on the record.

According to ICE, about 4,000 — fewer than a third — of those released in the past three years were Cubans, whose government refuses to take them back.

Others are from nations, such as China and India, that require time-consuming investigations before accepting deportees. Once released, all are monitored by either parolelike visits or more-sophisticated tracking such as GPS devices as the U.S. tries to deport them.

Though ICE doesn't keep crime statistics, it has tracked at least two murders since 2008 — the ones Adams cites — and says that anyone convicted of a crime goes back to jail.

One of the solutions Adams supports — an allowance for indefinite detention of immigrant criminals who can't be deported — has drawn the ire of human-rights groups.

"We're a nation of laws, and our laws don't condone indefinite detention unless there is exceptional circumstances. That is what a free society does," said Susana Barciela, policy director of the Miami-based advocacy group Americans for Immigrant Justice.

Adams rejects that view: Holding immigrants indefinitely, she has said, was "not a concern of mine." Her motivation, she said, is preventing further violence by released immigrant criminals.

Adams has also pressed the Obama administration to reduce the number of visas it issues to citizens of countries that don't accept their people back.

"This legal remedy works," Adams wrote in The Washington Times this month, citing it as key to convincing Guyana in 2001 to take back more than 100 immigrants the U.S. wanted to expel.

The fight gives Adams, elected with the strong backing of the tea party in 2010, a pet issue to attack the administration that appeals to conservatives. Adams, like many of her GOP peers, has advocated increased state and federal efforts to detain and deport immigrants here illegally.

The right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies has applauded her approach as a good companion to legislation filed by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, that would give greater power to immigration officials to hold criminal immigrants in custody if they can't be deported quickly — or at all.

"I think it is very useful to press the administration on why they have not been using the tools Congress has given them to encourage or incentivize other countries to take their people back," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the center.

"We have been far too timid or reluctant to use the leverage that we have. Ms. Adams is right to press them," she said.

Adams had asked that Homeland Security look into why it hasn't used the tactic of withholding visas more often. As of Friday afternoon — a deadline set by Adams — officials had not responded.

Under current law, immigration officials do have some leeway to hold immigrants indefinitely if they are deemed to have contagious diseases, are considered a terrorist threat or are an immediate danger to the community. But simply having a criminal record isn't enough.

Statistics from the past three years prove as much.

Of the 12,871 immigrants released from immigration detention centers from October 2008 to April 2011, about 68 percent had criminal records, according to ICE statistics.

Data on what they had been convicted of were unavailable. An oft-cited snapshot of the detainee population on Jan. 25, 2009, found that among those with criminal records — a 42 percent minority that day — the most common crimes were drug charges, assault and driving under the influence.

Opponents of tougher detention laws argue that keeping someone in detention indefinitely for a past crime — after the detainee has already served jail time — is categorically unfair, especially for immigrants from places such as Cuba where deportation is a remote possibility.

"We are not the kind of people who lock people up for life," said David Leopold of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

He described efforts by Adams and others as "politics pure and simple" and said that their push on this issue was proof they were going "out of their way to embarrass the administration."

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