Thread: Court to hear arguments on criminal immigrant data

Court to hear arguments on criminal immigrant data
Journalists want information on migrant convicts who weren't deported; U.S. says no.
By Rebecca Carr

WASHINGTON BUREAU


Tuesday, October 17, 2006

WASHINGTON — A federal court of appeals will hear arguments today in a case that has broad implications in the debate over illegal immigration and the public's right to know about illegal immigrant convicts who have not been deported, as required by law.

Cox Newspapers is asserting that the Justice Department should release the names, birth dates and identity numbers of illegal immigrants who have served prison time for serious crimes, including child molestation, manslaughter, drug dealing and drunken driving.

Cox, which publishes the Austin American-Statesman, hopes to use the data to show how many illegal immigrant convicts are slipping back into communities undetected rather than being deported to their native countries, as federal law requires. Cox revealed in a published report four years ago that hundreds of felons in Georgia were never picked up by immigration officials after serving their sentences.

The U.S. Justice Department says it has turned over some of the information requested by Cox under the Freedom of Information Act, which requires federal agencies to disclose government records to the public. The department gave Cox information about the convicts' native countries, dates they were taken into custody and dates of release, according to legal briefs filed in federal court.

But the release of personal information such as full names, dates of birth, immigrant registration numbers and FBI numbers would invade the privacy of convicted illegal immigrants and serve no public interest, Justice Department lawyers wrote in legal briefs.

The case is important because it raises the question of whether illegal immigrants should be granted the same privacy protections that citizens and legal residents have. Legal experts also say it illustrates how the federal government resists complying with disclosure requirements when it has embarrassing statistics to hide.

The lawsuit was filed by the Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers, which publishes 17 daily and 25 weekly newspapers.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon issued a summary judgment ruling Sept. 27, 2005, in favor of the Justice Department's decision to turn down Cox's request for personal information about the illegal immigrant convicts.

In that decision, Leon wrote that the privacy interest of the convicted illegal immigrants "far outweighs the public interest that might be served from disclosing this information."

Cox is appealing that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, saying that the public has the right to know whether the government has been derelict in its duty to deport convicts who are in the country illegally. The public also has the right to know whether the convicts have repeated their crimes, according to Cox lawyers Jonathan Hart and Michael Kovaka.

The Cox lawyers argue that the lower court failed to identify the harm that would come from disclosing the names of the convicted felons who evaded deportation.

"Established notions of privacy confirm that criminals generally have no legitimate privacy interest in limiting public knowledge of their crimes," Hart and Kovaka wrote in a brief filed with the court.

Congress specifically excluded illegal immigrants from the protections given to citizens and legal residents in the Privacy Act, they wrote.

The case is important to the public because the information in the government database reveals that federal immigration officials are failing to properly execute the law, Kovaka said in an interview.

"At the very least, this is an egregious inability of the government to fulfill its own obligations under the law, and it is endangering the public," Kovaka said.

Cox's quest for information about illegal immigrants goes back about four years.

On Dec. 15, 2002, the Cox Washington bureau published an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that revealed that 20 percent of the illegal immigrants who had been in Georgia's prison system were set free instead of being deported.

At least eight of the criminals were convicted of molesting children. Others were caught dealing drugs. Others were sent to prison for robbery.

The Cox reporters wanted to know whether the problem extended beyond Georgia.

The Cox Washington bureau filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act on Sept. 12, 2003, seeking records from the Justice Department about the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which keeps data on illegal immigrants in the prison system.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that privacy protections extend to personally identifying information and encompass criminal convictions that are a matter of public record, Justice Department lawyers wrote in a legal brief.

The release of additional information would permit the public to connect the records with individuals, the Justice Department argued, creating a clearly unwarranted invasion of their privacy. One of the department's main arguments against disclosure is the possibility of error: that a person would be wrongly identified as an illegal immigrant.

Open government and some legal experts disagree with the ruling.

It "defies logic" that people who are in the United States illegally and have been convicted of serious crimes have a privacy interest that outweighs the public's right to know what happens to them when they are released, said Jane Kirtley, a Freedom of Information Act expert and a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

In Texas, the prison system does not have definitive figures on the number of illegal immigrants in its lockups at any given time.

But during a congressional hearing last summer, state Department of Criminal Justice Inspector General John Moriarty estimated that at least 9,600 of the state's 152,000 inmates in 2005 were illegal immigrants. That included 6,600 prisoners with Immigration and Customs Enforcement "detainers" on their record and about 3,000 with federal deportation orders.



http://www.statesman.com/news/content/n ... felon.html

Ah! This is the heart of the matter.

If they release accurate information about this it will show at least tens of thousands of needlessly victimized Americans.

I hope and pray that Cox's lawsuit prevails and they get the data.

W