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Federal Government Notices That Foreigners Ignore Deportation Orders
A nationwide crackdown by the federal government on illegal immigrants who have ignored deportation orders has widened over the past several months, with the pace of arrests more than doubling in New Jersey since September, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics. Announced four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Absconder Apprehension Initiative sent 11 teams of investigators fanning out across the country to track down an estimated 314,000 undocumented immigrants who had been ordered deported but never left the country. The number of teams will expand to 18 this year, officials said. Initially, authorities concentrated on finding those considered the most potentially dangerous: an estimated 5,000 "absconders" from countries where the al Qaeda terrorist network has a presence and those who had committed crimes in the United States. ....The federal government launched the absconder initiative in January 2002 when the former Immigration and Naturalization Service was coming under heavy criticism for its inability to track foreigners entering and leaving the United States. Government studies showed up to 87 percent of those who are not detained after their deportation hearing wind up disappearing. When the initiative began, officials estimated it would result in the arrest of between 7 percent and 10 percent of the nationâs absconders in the first year. Two years later, just more than 6 percent have been caught. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2002, immigration agencies nationwide deported 4,267 fugitive absconders. The next year, 6,708 were deported. Since the start of fiscal year 2004 in October, 2,467 people have been deported, officials said. .... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-03-08 |
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