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Feds keep eye on jails to catch illegal immigrants upon their release

Deporting them is crucial to prevent serious crime, officials say.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 2, 2007

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Juan Martinez was looking forward to returning to his construction job after a one-month sentence for violating probation on drug charges.

But when he got out of the Orange County jail, he was met by immigration agents bent on deporting the 23-year-old illegal immigrant with $68 in his pocket and few prospects.

"I just probably won't come back," he said about being sent to Tijuana, Mexico. "If I do, I'll keep coming back to prison and I don't want that."

U.S. jails and prisons have become strategic chokepoints in the search for illegal immigrants.

More federal agents are more closely watching local jails for potentially tens of thousands of immigrants subject to deportation. Federal officials also are enlisting local authorities to do background checks on people under arrest.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say more jail checks are crucial to preventing serious crimes by illegal immigrants. In December, an illegal immigrant with a history of arrests for assaults and drug offenses shot two Long Beach police officers before he was killed in a gunbattle.

About half of the nearly 190,000 illegal immigrants deported last year had criminal records, U.S. authorities said.

Sweeps of jails over the past seven months by ICE agents have netted more than 5,500 people nationwide, and a new system designed to track federal inmates has flagged about 6,000 people at 119 prisons, the agency said.

Past efforts to identify illegal immigrants in jails were haphazard, with federal authorities checking inmate rosters at some lockups weekly at best.

[Last modified February 2, 2007, 01:44:01]