Deportation Efforts Snare More Noncriminals

THELMA GUERRERO
Statesman Journal
March 15, 2007
Rogelio Corona-Cuevas, a Mexican national, killed two members of a family in a 2003 drunken-driving collision north of Salem. Despite the illegal immigrant's five-year-long record of drunken driving and probation violations, he was never sent back to his home country.
Carlos Bernard Dennis, a Jamaican, broke into a Salem apartment, robbed the home and cut the occupant with a knife. The undocumented immigrant previously had been detained for driving with a suspended license and leaving the scene of an accident. He slipped through the cracks, however, remaining in the United States and committing another crime.
Deporting foreign-born criminals is supposed to be a priority for the U.S. immigration system, second only to national security.
However, a review of recent data shows that some criminal aliens have remained in the United States even after they have completed their sentences, while taxpayer money is used to nab people who are in the country illegally but who have no criminal record.
In the past 10 years, the number of criminal aliens doing time in Oregon prisons has fluctuated between 6 percent and 8 percent of the total prison population.
The numbers do not sit well with critics who say that keeping foreign-born criminals locked up in the state's prisons burdens taxpayers with the millions of dollars it costs to house them.
Some people want the heat turned up on the federal government to deport these inmates as soon as they walk out of prison doors.
Border-control advocates say that would help reduce the number of people who enter the country illegally and would curb the number of repeat offenders.
"It would send the message that this kind of behavior is not acceptable," said Salem resident Ken Evans, a government-relations specialist and former lobbyist.
Immigrant-rights advocates counter by pointing out that U.S.-born people commit more crimes than immigrants.
A 2006 Harvard University study supports their position, concluding that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are 45 percent less likely than Americans to commit crimes.
Paying for inmates
On Jan. 1, the total inmate population in the state's 13 prisons was 13,292, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections.
Foreign-born aliens accounted for 1,007, or about 8 percent, of the total prison population. Eighty percent of those were Mexican citizens. Some are repeat offenders.
Last year, the corrections department charged the federal government $32.5 million, the state's cost to house 1,722 foreign-born criminals lodged in state prisons between July 2004 and June 2005.
As of this week, Oregon's 2006 federal reimbursement had not been received or determined, DOC officials said.
Through its State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, or SCAAP, the federal government reimburses state and local governments the cost to keep undocumented criminals locked up. But federal reimbursement often comes up short, leaving states and counties to foot the full bill.
A recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice found that states with high immigrant populations typically receive only 25 percent of the cost to house criminal aliens in prisons. States with smaller immigrant populations such as Oregon receive less than that amount.
Evans offered a possible solution to the problem.
"We should have the inmates' countries of origin pay for their incarceration," he said.
Oregon rules
Oregon state law prohibits law enforcement officials from checking the immigration status of a person arrested for a crime, resulting in law enforcement officials' not turning over suspected illegal immigrants to immigration agents.
Meanwhile, the state Department of Corrections has the task of holding criminal aliens in prison.
That helps ensure "that the appropriate punishment given by an Oregon judge to individuals deemed as criminal aliens is served to completion," said DOC director Max Williams.