Shefiff wants illegal immigrant inmates deported

NY Times:

It did not sit right with the sheriff in this law-abiding city that illegal immigrants who landed in his jail for minor crimes were later released into the community and never deported.

The immigrants had been arrested for drunken driving or striking a spouse, usual police blotter material in a foothills county on the eastern rim of the Rockies.

Immigration agents, overwhelmed by a decade-old surge in illegal immigration to Colorado, said they had neither the time nor the resources to pick up the illegal immigrants whose violations were not grave.

But to Sheriff Jim Alderden of Larimer County, the facts seemed plain.

"They violated our borders and then they committed other crimes," Sheriff Alderden said. "I think these offenders should be deported."

Across the country, local law enforcement officials and irritated taxpayers are turning up the pressure on federal immigration authorities to identify illegal immigrants who are behind bars and deport them after they are freed.

Although that has generally been the practice with violent felons, illegal immigrants who commit lesser crimes are often overlooked by federal authorities, who say their resources are scarce.

Now, however, immigration agents say they are beginning to take the first steps to change that. The agents say they are rethinking the triage that led them to pass over the estimated hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with lesser offenses, even if they were imprisoned.

In some cases, the federal agents are allowing local authorities to screen immigrants to help detect those who should be deported.

In 2005, at least 270,000 illegal immigrants spent time in local jails and state prisons, according to the Justice Department. In federal prisons, more than 35,000 inmates, 19 percent of the total, were immigrants.

...

There is more, and it highlights the lack of seriousness with which immigration laws have been enforced by those who have been in charge of that enforcement. If they do not have the resources they need to tell Congress to get it for them, if border enforcement is important. What has really happened is that many in Congress view immigration law as something that only needs to be enforced sometimes and the lack of enforcement meant there were no consequences to violating the law which, in turn, only encouraged more violations.