Texas test case for inmate immigration screening

Houston Chronicle:

Texas prisons are test-driving the Obama administration’s planned nationwide immigration screening and are relaying for the first time the digital fingerprints of roughly 1,500 arriving inmates each week to the Department of Homeland Security.

The statewide screening at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s 24 facilities will likely extend to the nation’s 1,200 state and federal prisons and 3,100 local jails during President Barack Obama’s first term — all part of a high profile crackdown on criminal aliens who have committed serious crimes such as major drug offenses, murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping while living illegally inside the United States.

The cost to federal taxpayers is about $200 million this year and could grow to $1.1 billion by 2013, a fivefold increase in barely four years.

California is expected to be the next state to participate.

“We’re accelerating (screening) because it works,” says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former federal prosecutor and two-term governor of Arizona. “Our goal is looking at the public-safety aspects of illegal immigration.”

he program potentially targets tens of thousands of criminals who happen to be immigrants rather than the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who have entered the United States illegally but often remain law abiding after their arrival.

That focus on criminal aliens rather than undocumented immigrants “will be part of our enforcement strategy moving forward,” Napolitano says.

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So, is Napolitano not serious about enforcing the immigration laws for other aliens. Apparently that is the case. Inmate aliens are the low hanging fruit when it comes to immigration enforcement. They certainly should be a priority target and it gives illegals incentives to not get caught committing crimes. It does open her and the administration up to a challenge on equal protection of the law since it is clearly selective enforcement of immigration laws.