 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | January 2007 
New Jail System IDs More Illegal Immigrants
 William Finn Bennett - nctimes.com
| | U.S. Border Patrol agents prepare suspected illegal immigrants. (Khampha Bouaphanh/AP) |
San Diego County - Booked into the county jail in Vista on a recent night, chances were slim that Mexican citizen Fermin Camacho Furtado would be savoring the taste of freedom anytime soon.
Within a few hours of being picked up that night on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had identified Furtado as an illegal immigrant who was deported from the United States in March 2001 and who had re-entered the country illegally the same month.
Now, just days before Christmas, Furtado was back in custody and sheepishly answering the questions posed to him by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Fidel Santillan. The 24-year-old native of Oaxaca admitted to Santillan that he was in the country illegally.
Once immigration officials had placed a hold on him, he could not be released until he was deported or an immigration judge saw him and decided otherwise, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Lauren Mack said recently.
The days may be ending when illegal immigrants are jailed in San Diego County for minor offenses, then processed and released before anyone realizes they are in the country illegally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say.
Federal officials have spent recent months gradually increasing the use of the computer system known as the Jail Information Management System, or JIMS, said Robert Culley, acting field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Detention and Removal Program.
Numbers on the rise
Because of the system, the number of illegal immigrants who are being identified in county jails is increasing with every passing month, immigration and customs records show. In July, 204 potentially deportable men and women were held under immigration restrictions in county jails; in August, 281; in September, 374; in October, 416; and in November, 845.
Culley said he believes the new system will allow federal agents to keep thousands more illegal immigrants off the streets each year - some of them dangerous criminals - by identifying and holding them in county jails for U.S. immigration officials to question. Many of those illegal immigrants will eventually be deported, immigration officials say.
"As we get better, we will identify more and more," Culley said.
Mack said she estimates that most of the men and women who are booked into county jails are arrested for relatively minor crimes that often put them back on the street in a matter of hours. Only by screening detainees around the clock as they enter the system can officials hope to prevent many illegal immigrants from slipping through the cracks, she added.
"In the past, they used to get on the street before we could identify them as illegal immigrants," Mack said.
Up until January, immigration officials only made sporadic visits to local jails to screen for those who might be subject to deportation, she said.
In that month, the federal agency began screening inmates for immigration status at the four county jails that are responsible for booking the approximately 100,000 men and women passing through the system each year. Anyone who is arrested in San Diego County is booked into the Vista Detention Facility; the Central Detention Facility in downtown San Diego; the South Bay Detention Facility in Chula Vista; or the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee.
Goal is to work 24/7
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials started the screenings with one eight-hour shift a day in January, and in late September increased to two full shifts a day. By mid-February officials expect to increase to three shifts covering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Mack said.
And once the system is operating around the clock, she said, the agency expects it will be placing holds on as many as 1,200 men and women a month. That would be more than 14,000 immigration holds a year, roughly triple the 3,000 to 5,000 immigrants, legal and illegal, the county has released annually to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in recent years.
"It will mean people won't get back on the street to commit more crimes or add to the thousands of immigrant fugitives we are already looking for," Mack said. "Every single person that is booked into a county jail will meet face to face with an ICE agent to verify his immigration status."
The U.S. government created Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2003 in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The new agency absorbed much of the enforcement side of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services and the U.S. Border Patrol, both of which had been responsible for fighting illegal immigration. The new agency is charged with identifying criminal activities and eliminating vulnerabilities that pose a threat to the nation's borders, as well as enforcing economic, transportation and infrastructure security.
In recent years, some illegal immigration opponents have criticized the agency for neglecting to reduce the number of illegal immigrants, as it focused on protecting the nation from terrorist threats.
Recently, however, the agency has begun to focus more attention on interior enforcement, workplace enforcement and identifying criminals at county jails, Mack said.
"Our priority is still to provide homeland security, but to do that, we have to make sure there are no vulnerabilities in the legal or illegal immigration system," she said.
Even before the new federal identification system was put in place at local jails, county Sheriff Department's data were showing a steady increase in the number of illegal immigrants incarcerated in county jails. And the numbers continue to increase, Sheriff's Department documents show.
Between Dec. 1, 2005, and Nov. 30, 2006, the county released to federal officials 5,041 prisoners on whom federal immigration officials had placed holds. That number represented 5.15 percent of the total number of men and women who were booked into county jails.
By comparison, during the same months in 2002 to 2003, the county released to federal immigration officials slightly fewer than 3,000 prisoners, or 3.25 percent of the total number of those booked in the same period.
You never know
Now, regardless of race or ethnicity, men and women who are booked into county jails are questioned by immigration officials who are permanently assigned to those jails and whose only job is to ferret out illegal immigrants. However, because there are only agents at the jails for two out of the three shifts each day, some illegal immigrants continue to slip through the cracks, Mack said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Supervisor Rick Abend said he has two reasons for wanting to screen every single inmate. For one, it avoids accusations that the agency is using racial profiling, he said. And, it is hard to tell who might be an illegal immigrant. Over the years, he has seen a number of inmates who surprised him, Abend said.
"It could be a South African who came here at the age of 1 and now is a Nazi low-rider," Abend said. "Our goal is to interview everybody."
The agents ask all detainees a series of questions about their citizenship, place of birth and other things about their background. If their answers sound suspicious or contradictory, agents will do more investigation and run names and fingerprints through a number of government databases.
Abend said that in order to help officials determine who may be lying to them and saying they were born in the U.S., agents ask questions such as, "How many stars are on the American flag, or, What grade did you get in recess - things you or I would know about."
One of the ways that some illegal immigrants try to fool officers is by saying they are from Mexico when in fact they are from other parts of Latin America. Mack said they often do that because if they are from Mexico, they will be released in that country, often just across the border. Citizens of other Latin American countries, however, are deported to their country of origin. For those who plan on trying to illegally re-enter the United States, it's much cheaper and easier from Mexico than Honduras, for example.
Abend said officers will ask those they believe are trying to pass themselves off as Mexicans questions that typically only a Mexican would know the answer to, for example: What is the Day of the Dead? or What plant does tequila comes from?
"Every (agent) has their tricks," Abend said.
Costs
County sheriff's officials say the 5,041 prisoners who ended up being released to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the last 12 months spent an average of 19.8 days in custody. The cost of housing each inmate was $90 a day. Based on those numbers, the county spent an estimated $9 million to house them.
The federal government has a program that reimburses local jurisdictions for part of the costs of housing illegal immigrant prisoners. However, the amount of the reimbursement is far below the actual costs - a point that has been a major bone of contention between local and federal officials.
For example, in the 2005 federal fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, San Diego County received $2.35 million in federal reimbursement to help defray the costs of housing illegal immigrants in jails, according to Cmdr. Ken Culver, who heads up detention programs for the Sheriff's Department. During roughly the same period, the county spent more than $7 million on jailed illegal immigrants and those subject to deportation, county records show.
The county has not yet received its partial payback from the federal government for fiscal year 2006-07, Culley added.
Some of that cost is from repeat business. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say that about 35 percent of those illegal immigrants who are caught in the United States and returned to their country end up returning illegally to the U.S. and being arrested again
Types of crime
Sheriff's officials said they do not systematically record data that looks at the types of crimes being committed by illegal immigrants. The most comprehensive review conducted to date on the makeup of populations in San Diego County jails and their crimes was conducted by sheriff's officials in 2002. That study, called "Bookings - A Study of Persons Detained in the San Diego County Jail System," looked at about 100,000 bookings a year between 1997 and 1999.
The study suggested that immigrants' place of birth had little to do with the type of crime being committed. About 28 percent of the crimes of all the crimes committed by those incarcerated in county jails were violent, regardless of whether they were born in San Diego County, elsewhere in the U.S. or in another country, the study showed.
A snapshot taken on Nov. 30 showed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had placed immigration holds on 60 detainees at the Vista jail.
And while the proportions can vary from one day to the next, the numbers showed that on that day, about 32 percent, or 19 of those 60 prisoners, were incarcerated on charges related to violence.
Contact staff writer William Finn Bennett at (760) 740-5426, or wbennett@nctimes.com. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us