U.S. Deportees Cart Crime to Native Lands

The U.S. government calls them criminal aliens, but they are as American as drive-by shootings and crack cocaine.

Many came to the United States as children, often in the arms of men and women fleeing poverty and war. They went to school here, but usually not for long. They came of age on city streets from Los Angeles to New York. Eventually, they broke the law.

In 1996, Congress banished them from the United States for life and directed immigration agents to hunt them down. The biggest dragnet in U.S. history is underway. Already, more than 500,000 have been rounded up and deported, according to government figures, and this year, they are being banished at a rate of one every seven minutes to more than 160 countries worldwide.

The culture of drugs and guns many carry back to their native lands is wreaking havoc in nations that receive them in substantial numbers.

A six-month Associated Press investigation, which included interviews with more than 300 police, deportees, church leaders, social scientists and government officials in the United States and abroad, found that in some countries, the resulting crime waves are overwhelming police.

In Jamaica, one out of every 106 males over 15 is a criminal deportee from the United States. Ten thousand strong, most live in the capital city of Kingston. Jamaican police say they have been involved in hundreds of murders.

In Guyana, more than 600 criminal deportees have been absorbed by a country of fewer than 700,000 people. Before their arrival, drive-by shootings, car hijackings, kidnappings and bank robberies were relatively uncommon, said Ronald Gajraj, the country’s home affairs minister. Now such crimes are a constant part of Guyanese life.

In Honduras, according to the latest figures from Interpol, murders increased from 1,615 in 1995 to 9,241 in 1998, after the first wave of what is now 7,000 criminal deportees. Honduran police say the guns, drugs and gangs they have brought with them are largely responsible.

Under the 1996 U.S. law, every noncitizen sentenced to a year or more in prison is subject to deportation, even if the sentence is suspended. Deportable crimes can be anything from murder to petty theft. The law is retroactive, and it eliminated nearly all grounds for appeal.

As many as 250,000 aliens now serving time in U.S. prisons, on probation or on parole have been marked for deportation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total number of deportable criminal aliens among the estimated 11.8 million noncitizens living in the United States is unknown.

Eighty percent of the deportees are being sent to seven Caribbean and Latin American countries -- Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic -- places where jobs are scarce and police resources are limited. Mexico has absorbed 340,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Deported after serving sentences for their crimes in the United States, the criminal deportees are simply set loose upon arrival, usually with little or no money and with no prospects for work.

In El Salvador, the criminal deportees are greeted at the airport by Roman Catholic charity workers, given a sandwich and bus fare, and sent on their way. In the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic, officials said many have been dropped at the airport by U.S. immigration escorts without even the bus fare to get to town.

To survive in what for most of them are unfamiliar surroundings, many turn to crime.

The criminal deportees who most worry receiving countries are the gang members.

In Honduras and El Salvador, Los Angeles street gangs with names like Mara Dieciocho (the 18th Street Gang) and Mara Salvatrucha (the 13th Street Gang) are competing for a piece of the drug trade, warring with indigenous thugs and one another.

“We’re sending back sophisticated criminals to unsophisticated, unindustrialized societies,” said Al Valdez, an Orange County assistant district attorney and gang expert. “They overwhelm local authorities.”

For example, he said, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one detective is working 139 gang homicides.

In El Salvador and Honduras, many of the deportees become victims before they can become victimizers. Regarded as pariahs in their native lands, they are hunted by vigilante squads.

In San Pedro Sula, vigilantes with assault rifles prowl the night, searching for young men with American gang tattoos, said the city’s Roman Catholic bishop, Romulo Emiliani. “They approach young people, open their shirts and if they have tattoos, they don’t ask anything. They just kill them.”

The 1996 law was intended to reduce crime in the United States by getting rid of some of the people who commit it. Large-scale deportations are a relatively new crime-prevention strategy. There were criminal deportations in the past, but the number last year alone exceeded the total between 1905 and 1986.

In 1986, immigration agents began focusing on deporting aliens who had committed serious felonies punishable by at least five years in prison. In that year, fewer than 2,000 were deported. The number increased to 33,842 in 1995.

With passage of the 1996 law, criminal deportations surged again; the number this year is expected to reach 77,000, according to U.S. government statistics.

Forty-one percent of the deportations last year were drug-related, and no other crime accounted for more than 10%.

The criminal deportees represent a fraction of the 11 million noncitizens who have been deported from the United States, or allowed to leave voluntarily in lieu of deportation, since 1996. Most had entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas.

One in every 11 U.S. residents -- 32.5 million people -- was born abroad. According to a report by a group that included the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the crime rate among immigrants is only half to a third that of native-born U.S. citizens. But unlike citizens, aliens who commit crimes can simply be sent home.

Officials in many of the receiving countries, however, said “home” is not where the criminal aliens are going -- that many, perhaps most, were children when they first came to the United States and have no real connections to the countries of their birth.

The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has no statistics to support or refute this, and most receiving countries don’t either.

But officials in the Azores, a stable, Western European society that keeps reliable statistics, said 71% of its nearly 500 criminal deportees were under 13 when they first left for the United States and an additional 8% were teenagers. When they returned, many did not even speak Portuguese.

Guyana’s foreign minister, Rudy Insanally, said many Guyanese who immigrate to the United States with their children are well educated, yet their children return as criminals. “You are sending us the dregs of your society and, at the same time, you are poaching our teachers and nurses,” he said.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a primary author of the 1996 law, responded that until immigrants obtain citizenship, they are guests in the United States. “When they commit a serious crime, they have, under our laws, forfeited the right to live among us.”

The only problem with the law, he said, is that too many eventually make their way back through the United States’ porous borders.

In Mexico, criminal deportees tend to remain in border towns, where U.S. immigration agents drop them off by bus. There, they await their chance to slip back into the United States. In the meantime, according to Mexican police, some traffic in drugs and commit other crimes.

Associated Press writer Sharon Crenson contributed to this report.