Immigration agents target area jails
Web Posted: 03/11/2009 11:45 CDT
Gloria Ferniz
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Ice agents with CAP (Criminal Alien Program), comb detention cells at the Bexar County Jail Tuesday, March 10 looking for criminals who have entered the US illegally.

The startled inmate had just woken up from napping on a bare jail cell bench when the officer launched a barrage of questions with no patience for slow answers.

What’s your name? Where were you born? What school did you go to in San Antonio? What was the name of the school mascot?

Not typical questions for inmates just booked into Bexar County Jail. Then again, it wasn’t a sheriff’s deputy but a federal immigration agent doing the questioning. Since 9-11, the federal government has emphasized the need to track down and deport unauthorized immigrants, giving priority to violent criminals. The effort has seen the dramatic expansion of the Criminal Alien Program, or CAP.

The program, which was created with a limited scope in 1988, involves dispatching agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to local jails to identify inmates who are in the country illegally so they can be put up for deportation after completing their sentences.

The CAP budget has skyrocketed from $53 million in 2005 to $189 million this year, and there has been a more than threefold increase in identified inmates in just two years, from 67,000 in x 2006 to 221,085 last year.

The trend is evident in ICE’s 54-county operation in South Texas, headquartered in San Antonio. South Texas CAP enforcement more than doubled the number of identified unauthorized inmates, from 5,349 in 2007, when the program started here, to 11,704 last year.

The numbers represent those with a “detainer,â€