INS: Effort to Involve Foreign-Born Inmates : INS Effort to Include Interviews With Inmates

U.S. immigration authorities said Thursday that they plan to interview every foreign-born crime suspect arrested in San Diego County as part of a nationwide effort to step up deportation of foreigners convicted of crimes in the United States.

“The removal of criminal aliens is one of (our) . . . top priorities,” Harold Ezell, western commissioner for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said in a news conference in San Diego.

Ezell acknowledged that the INS has occasionally lost track of criminal aliens, an oversight that has resulted in the aliens being released rather than deported.

“We have not been as strong as we should have been,” Ezell said. “You will see a difference.”

While deportation from such cities as New York or Chicago may deter criminals from returning to those parts of the country, Ezell conceded that deported criminals could easily re-enter border areas such as San Diego.

In such cases, Ezell said, “There’s not much you can do other than keep picking ‘em up and sending ‘em back.”

In San Diego County, INS agents seeking aliens who could be deported will attempt to interview each foreign-born person among the 125,000 suspects booked annually in jails in San Diego on assorted criminal charges, said James B. Turnage, the INS’s district director here. Although such interviews were once routine, Turnage said that other matters have taken manpower away from efforts to find deportable aliens in San Diego jails.

“But this has become a major problem again and we’re placing more emphasis (on it),” Turnage said.

Officials acknowledged a major loophole: many foreign-born criminal suspects could probably avoid being interviewed by simply lying on arrest forms and stating that they were born in the United States.

To step up deportations, Turnage said that the INS plans to assign additional investigators to monitor county jails, in part at the expense of other efforts, such as fraud investigations. In an effort to increase coordination, Ezell said that INS personnel will also be assigned to assist other law enforcement agencies in operations such as drug task forces.

San Diego law enforcement officials said they welcomed the INS’s new initiatives. In an effort to save money and ease the already overcrowded prisons, Sheriff John Duffy said that sheriff’s officers routinely decline misdemeanor prosecutions of illegal aliens and simply turn them over to the INS.

“What’s the point of wasting taxpayer’s money to house them for a minor crime?” asked Duffy, who appeared at the press conference along with Ezell.

The stepped-up enforcement effort by the INS comes at a time when San Diego law enforcement officials and authorities in other U.S.-Mexico border areas are increasingly blaming rising crime rates on aliens entering the United States illegally. Such assertions have drawn strong criticism from immigrants’ rights groups and others who have charged that the allegations are based on misleading arrest statistics and are used to inflame passions against aliens and Latinos.

“(It’s) racist and scapegoating of the worst type,” said Herman Baca, chairman of the Committee on Chicano Rights, in a telephone interview.

Ezell, whose comments have often been assailed by such groups as incendiary and racist, said this latest INS initiative “is not an anti-immigrant program.”

Baca disagreed, contending that Ezell was once again using “scare-monger” tactics to influence the passage of controversial immigration reform legislation pending in Congress.

Duffy estimated that illegal aliens account for one-quarter of all burglary arrests and one-third of all rape arrests by the sheriff’s office. In San Diego’s six county jails, officials said that 14% of the 2,838 inmates were foreign-born, according to an INS survey conducted July 21.

The issue at hand centers on provisions in U.S. law which allow for the deportation of foreigners involved in criminal behavior. In New York and elsewhere, the INS has come under criticism for not aggressively deporting drug dealers and other criminals once their prison terms have been completed. INS officials, who say they are moving to correct the problem, blame it in part on manpower shortages and lack of coordination with other law enforcement agencies.

“The problem is substantial in the larger cities,” said Verne Jervis, a spokesman for the INS in Washington. “Those are places where we’re stretched thin and the criminal justice system is also stretched thin.”

The largest numbers of deportable foreigners, officials say, are the so-called illegal aliens who have entered the United States without papers. In addition, foreign nationals legally residing in the United States may be deportable if they are convicted of certain felonies or of crimes of “moral turpitude,” such as larceny, rape and manslaughter. Legal aliens may also be deported if they are found to be drug addicts.

However, it is the responsibility of the INS, through inspections and interviews, to check jails and identify deportable aliens who are being detained. Once identified, the INS places a “hold” on inmates; local authorities are then supposed to inform the INS when the aliens are ready to be released. If appropriate, the INS can then initiate deportation proceedings against the released prisoners.