OxfordPress.com

Interior immigration enforcement out-numbered

WASHINGTON — With activists staging protests in Arizona against porous borders, U.S. officials on Capitol Hill Thursday conceded that illegal immigration has overwhelmed enforcement efforts.

Victor X. Cerda, an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that his agency's docket of suspected illegal residents has soared to 1 million people.

One-third will never show up for their deportation hearings, he told a Senate Committee hearing. And among those who are ordered to leave the country, 85 percent simply drop out of sight instead.

"We have a large fugitive alien population," said Cerda, acting director for detention and removal at the immigration agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The number of immigration absconders has risen to 465,000, he said.

Detaining more immigration law violators would ensure greater compliance, said Cerda. But since his agency has only 19,000 beds available, he said that the vast majority—all except those considered to be in the highest risk categories—are released.

Once set free, they can melt into the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal population. With only 6,000 federal immigration agents in the nation's interior, most have little to fear from federal authorities.

At the same time, a U.S. Justice Department official told the senators that 920 convicted alien criminals, including rapists, murderers and child molesters must be released onto American streets because of recent Supreme Court rulings.

Jonathan Cohn, deputy assistant attorney general in the civil division, said that these criminal aliens must be freed when the government fails to convince their home countries, such as Vietnam and Cuba, to take them back.

Cohn urged the lawmakers to rewrite deportation laws since the high court has given criminal aliens the right to challenge their removal all the way through the federal judiciary. Cohn urged Congress to write a law giving much more limited access to the federal courts.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairing the immigration subcommittee hearing, said the interior enforcement system was "over-lawyered and under-equipped."

Cornyn and Republican Senate colleague, Jon Kyl of Arizona, called the hearing as part of their joint campaign to bolster immigration enforcement while opening the door to more temporary foreign workers.

The two senators have announced they will draft a comprehensive immigration bill this summer.

The hearing hinted at the difficulty of finding agreement on the issue.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., used the session to attack as "vigilantes" the several hundred "Minuteman Project" activists who have been gathering along the Arizona-Mexico border this month to demand more enforcement.

Kennedy warned against efforts to curtail the legal rights of immigrants and called "habeas corpus" (legal review) "a fundamental principle of American justice."

On the other side of the debate, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., lambasted the government's failure to enforce immigration laws, praised the Minuteman effort for focusing attention on the lax borders and disagreed with President Bush's criticism of the citizens' effort as vigilantism.

"He doesn't get it," Coburn said of the president.