INS Initiates Plan to Deport Aliens Held in County Jail

Immigration officials said Monday that a pilot program aimed at deporting hundreds of illegal and legal aliens convicted of crimes and serving time in county jails has begun in Los Angeles and three other cities.

The program here consists of “tracking” records to determine the citizenship status of Los Angeles County Jail inmates. Those found to be aliens, whether in the country illegally or not, could be subject to deportation after serving their sentences.

Precisely how many illegal aliens are serving local jail time is unknown. INS officials said, however, that a preliminary survey conducted over a four-month period ending Jan. 31 indicated that more than 1,227 aliens who had committed crimes serious enough to be grounds for deportation were in custody in Los Angeles County. Of those, just under half were serving time for narcotics violations.

Previously, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had kept regular tabs only on the citizenship status of inmates at state prisons and federal institutions. The INS has a “hold” on about 7,000 aliens now serving California state prison terms.

While state prisoners have been detained and deported after serving their terms, the INS had not pursued as vigorous a program at the county level. Inmates of state prisons are people convicted of felonies; county jails hold those convicted of misdemeanors.

But on Monday, at a news conference called by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, INS officials said they will soon formalize an agreement with Los Angeles County for a yearlong program that began informally with Sheriff Sherman Block last month. The test program will also be conducted in Miami, Chicago and New York City.

Ernest Gustafson, head of the Los Angeles INS office, said he has reassigned five agents to review records at County Jail. At first, holds will be placed on those aliens serving time for narcotics violations, but eventually the INS will expand the program to track those convicted of other misdemeanors, he said.

Legal resident aliens convicted of narcotics violations or two serious misdemeanors generally would be deportable, while someone with only a single conviction for a crime like shoplifting might not be, Gustafson said.

Under the program, once a jail inmate completes his term, he will be turned over to the INS and then detained pending deportation proceedings.

Also subject to a hold and eventual deportation are illegal aliens who have been arrested but are eventually cleared of a crime, Gustafson said. Those people would simply be deported on grounds that they entered the country illegally, he added.

Lee O’Connor, an attorney with the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights Inc., said that as for “people that are criminal types, I don’t think too many people criticize the deportation of them.”

But O’Connor warned that it would not be good if the program leads to a perception among aliens that the police work hand-in-hand with the INS.

“The main point is you don’t want to discourage victims from reporting criminal violations to the police, and if the police cooperate with immigration you may very well be doing that,” O’Connor said.

Gustafson dismissed O’Connor’s concern as unfounded. “I don’t see where that would even enter into it,” he said, explaining that the program is not an effort to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies. Rather, he said, it is focused simply on deporting people already in custody.

Gustafson said he believes that the main effect of the program will be a reduction in criminal alien repeat offenders. Someone formally deported from the United States can be convicted of a felony simply for re-entering the country, he said.

“I think you’ll eventually see that local law enforcement and the INS are serious about removing criminal aliens from this country,” he said.

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Rick Merrick said that although the effect of the new program is unclear, it would not do much to curb the chronic overcrowding of the county jail facilities. But Merrick said the “long-term hope” of local authorities is that once the aliens are deported they will remain in their home countries and not try to recross U.S. borders.

Merrick said the INS/County program will begin focusing on inmates serving longer sentences so that immigration officials have time to begin the deportation process. Eventually, however, aliens serving shorter sentences would be subject to deportation, Merrick said, adding that under the new immigration law, “the mere fact they are in jail for a misdemeanor does not always render them deportable.”