Deportation complications

Houston Chronicle:

Rebecca Harrison clutched a red folder of court papers detailing her ex-husband's molestation conviction from 16 years earlier, waiting for her case to be called by a Harris County family court judge.

"I just can't believe it," she said, warily eyeing her ex-husband, Mohammed Malekzadeh, a native of Iran, as he sat on a wooden bench in the hallway outside the courtroom Tuesday. "We always assumed he would be deported when he finished his sentence. Everyone did. It's scary."

Malekzadeh was, in fact, ordered deported from the U.S. in 2001 while still serving a 30-year sentence in a Texas prison for drugging a teenage employee of his auto repair business and molesting her. But because of a diplomatic and bureaucratic stalemate with Iran, immigration officials were unable to secure travel documents needed to formally deport Malekzadeh after he was released from prison last year.

The repatriation problem is not unique to this case — or even one country.

An estimated 139,000 immigrants from eight countries — China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jamaica, Laos and Vietnam — have been ordered removed from the U.S. but have not been deported because of delays or refusals by foreign governments to issue the required travel documents. Of those 139,000, about 18,000 have criminal convictions, according to estimates provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to the office of U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa.

Dent has co-sponsored a House bill that mirrors legislation proposed by U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that would amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to prohibit providing aid to countries that deny or unreasonably delay attempts to send back their citizens. The bills also contain provisions that would prohibit U.S. officials from issuing visas to people from countries that block the repatriation of immigrants.

Dent said the delays and denials by foreign governments have put convicted criminals eligible for deportation back on America's streets and have cut into the nation's immigration detention budget.

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Even Malekzadeh, 59, is trying to understand why he's still in Houston. He was paroled from prison into the custody of immigration officials on June 28, 2007, and held in an ICE detention facility in Houston for about nine months until he was released this spring.

"I want to go. The (U.S.) government wants me to go," Malekzadeh said, adding that ICE officials contacted the Iranian Embassy nine times about his case. "There is no question about it."

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There is much more.

While the legislation makes a lot of sense it would probably have no impact on Malekzadeh's case since Iran is already cut off from normal diplomatic relations with the US.

Not mentioned is Nigeria which is a special case. It does accept its citizens after they have finished their time in US prisons, but it then puts them in a Nigerian prison for further detention. This makes them the most reluctant deportees in the system.