No Second Chance for Criminal Immigrants

Federal authorities in Orange County, Los Angeles and elsewhere are aggressively prosecuting a “commuter class” of illegal immigrants with criminal records in a policy shift that is swamping federal courts and swelling prison populations.

The get-tough approach is yet another manifestation of the nation’s ongoing crackdown against illegal immigrants with criminal pasts.

This time, federal prosecutors are targeting deportees who return to the United States illegally after being barred from reentry. It is a crime that, until recently, was seldom prosecuted.

Now that it is, the government finds itself in the ironic position of keeping under lock and key--at considerable public expense--the very people it most wants out of the country.

Take the case of Maximo Marquez-Perez. Four times in the past few years, the 24-year-old Mexican citizen illegally crossed the border into the United States after being deported. He did it one more time last August, traveling to the Huntington Beach home of his wife and son.

This time, he will pay a heavy price for setting foot again in this country. Marquez-Perez, a former gang member with a criminal record in the United States, was picked up in a routine traffic stop, turned over to immigration authorities and eventually sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison.

Marquez-Perez is one of thousands snared by the Justice Department effort targeting immigrants with criminal records who return across the border after being thrown out. Armed with stricter sentencing laws and increased resources, authorities are charging such lawbreakers like never before, sending thousands of them to U.S. jails.

The government will spend about $125,000 alone for Marquez-Perez’s incarceration, in addition to thousands more in court costs.

“The costs are astronomical. . . . What does the taxpayer get out of this? Very, very little,” said H. Dean Steward, a federal public defender who works in Santa Ana. “‘We are awash in . . . cases. It’s a terrible drain on attorney resources.”

In California’s Central District, which includes Orange and Los Angeles counties, the number of “illegal reentry” cases involving immigrants with criminal records more than doubled between 1997 to 1998, to 266.

The Orange County federal public defender’s office now dedicates nearly one-third of its resources to representing such offenders. And the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles says that these prosecutions represent a fifth of its entire caseload, more than other type of crime.

The caseload has grown so much in Southern California that the U.S. attorney’s office now plans to lighten the burden by being more selective about the cases it chooses to prosecute, charging only those immigrants with the most serious criminal records. Still, officials still expect to prosecute hundreds a year.

The court crunch is even more severe along the U.S.-Mexico border, where the number of such cases has skyrocketed.

At San Diego federal court, 1,476 deportees with records were prosecuted for illegal reentry in 1998, a number exceeding the total prosecuted during the 10-year period from 1985 to 1994. Nationally, prosecutions jumped almost 300% from 1994 to 1998, from 698 to 2,749.

“We’re just inundated. This is not like any federal court that I’ve ever seen,” said Fred Kay, the head of the federal public defender’s office in Tucson, where officials plan to increase staffing to handle the extra workload.

Besides the increased caseloads, the policy is contributing to record growth in the number of federal prisoners. Over the last three years, 6,589 immigrants with criminal records nationwide have been prosecuted under the crackdown for illegal reentry.

It costs $420 a week each to hold them in federal institutions, so the bill for incarcerating the thousands of lawbreakers across the nation runs into the tens of millions of dollars.

At the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, for example, more than 10% of the 1,028 inmates are immigrants with criminal histories who were convicted of illegally reentering the country. The INS has also leased space at local jails--including Santa Ana’s City Jail--to house those awaiting trial.

Authorities Call It Money Well Spent

Authorities say the costs of incarceration are small compared to the benefits of ridding American communities of criminals who continually cross the border to commit serious crimes. The threat of imprisonment is an effective deterrent, they say, and has contributed to lower crime rates, especially in border regions.

“We think that prosecuting several thousand individuals who have committed every imaginable type of crime, including homicide, rape, and robbery . . . has had an impact,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. John Kraemer in San Diego.

But immigrant rights advocates and federal public defenders say there is no evidence that the policy has reduced crime or deterred unlawful immigration. Moreover, critics call the measures extremely unfair, in part because the punishment varies widely from one federal district court to another.

For instance, district courts in the Central District of California--including Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties--have slapped sentences of almost 6 1/2 years on many defendants. That triples the penalty typically meted out by federal judges in San Diego.

Just last week, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “gross sentencing disparities” exist in such cases, opening the door for judges to impose lighter penalties in some cases. “The Government has identified no other federal criminal statute that has spawned such enormous disparities,” the judges wrote.

Federal public defenders in Los Angeles say the decision could ultimately lead to reduced sentences for dozens already convicted of illegal reentry and sentenced to six years or more in federal prison.

At the same, some defense attorneys complain that prosecutors are arbitrary in deciding whom to prosecute. “Not even close to half the people who commit the crime are being charged,” noted Karl Gunn, senior deputy federal public defender in Los Angeles. “So you have this hidden, unreviewable prosecutorial decision that affects people’s lives.”

But even with shorter sentences, some advocates say the penalties do not fit the crime. Illegal presence in the United States, many contend, is the ultimate “victim-less” crime, often associated with people reuniting with family members or seeking work.

“People are serving sentences that are way out of whack and unfair,” said Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. “Typically a crime is, you steal, you hurt, you defraud, you kill somebody. Here, there’s no one who is a victim of the person’s presence in the United States.”

Some critics say the policy amounts to an illegal scheme of “preventive detention,” aimed less at deterring illegal immigration than locking up those who, in the view of authorities, may pose future threats to society.

But prosecutors and other proponents say allowing illegal immigrants with criminal records to reenter the country without fear of penalty would send the wrong message.

In fact, the ongoing crackdown is part of a broader national effort to identify noncitizens whose criminal records subject them to deportation. The INS now regularly canvasses jails and prisons nationwide, including L.A. County Jail. A steady stream of ex-inmates is now channeled into removal from the United States.

“A criminal is a criminal,” said John McAllister, the INS assistant district director for investigations in Los Angeles. “The public wants all criminals off the streets, and if it happens to be people in the country illegally, we endeavor to take care of that.”

Budget Boost Enforces Laws Long on Books

Laws barring deportees with criminal backgrounds from reentering the United States have been on the books for years. But, until recently, such statutes were rarely enforced because authorities lacked the manpower to apprehend, identify and prosecute violators. That is changing, in part because of record budget increases for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The crackdown was strengthened in 1996 with the passage of two laws making it easier for the INS to deport illegal immigrants. The laws also resulted in stiffened penalties for deportees with criminal records who reenter the country.

Now, illegal immigrants convicted of committing an “aggravated felony”--a broad category ranging from small-time drug dealing to murder--cannot reenter the country for as long as 20 years after being deported. Violations face up to 20 years in U.S. prison.

In the most recent fiscal year, the INS deported 171,000 illegal immigrants, a 50% increase from the previous year. About one-third of all deportees had criminal records, according to the INS.

Marquez-Perez, the former Huntington Beach gang member now facing six years behind bars, was convicted of four crimes previously. The most serious was his guilty plea to selling $40 worth of cocaine. His current federal sentence is almost double the total time he served on his four previous convictions.

In an interview from Santa Ana jail, Marquez-Perez said he returned to this country only to bring his wife and 2-year-old son back to Mexico with him. He was turned over to the INS last year after Huntington Beach police pulled him over for driving a car without a front license plate.

His wife, 18-year-old Alma Vasquez, said she was making preparations to move to Mexico when he was apprehended.

“We are willing to leave with him at the moment and not come back,” Vasquez wrote to the federal judge who sentenced her husband. “Please. Please, with tears in my eyes and my heart in my hands, let my husband be free . . . so we can form a new life in Mexico.”

The sentence leaves Marquez-Perez feeling sad and bitter. “I changed my life. . . . I quit drugs and the gang. And now they’re giving me six years for nothing.”

Prosecutors reject his story, however, saying Marquez-Perez had no plans to return to Mexico and that he would have likely returned to his life of crime in the United States.

Marquez-Perez’s sentence draws no sympathy from supporters of the crackdown. They say allowing illegal immigrants with criminal records to reenter the country without fear of penalty would send the wrong message.

“I don’t think anyone wants to see these people on the streets of the U.S.,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Deportees and Jails

Prosecutions of deported criminal aliens increased nearly 300% between 1994 and 1998 and are showing no signs of declining. During the first four months of the current fiscal year there were 1,018 such cases. Here’s the fiscal year trend:

1994: 698

1995: 1,525

1996: 1,595

1997: 2,245

1998: 2,749

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service