House Subcommittee Holds Hearing on Illegal Immigration
Immigration
The New Bedford Standard-Times
Cristian Hernandez
Boston University Washington News Service
04/02/09
WASHINGTON—Lawmakers and immigration enforcement agencies agreed Thursday that deportation of criminal illegal aliens should be a priority. But they disagreed about some of the administration’s policy choices.
The agreement was expressed during a hearing by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.
“Last year we directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] to use $1 billion of its resources to identify and remove aliens convicted of crimes, whether in custody or at large,” said subcommittee chairman David Price, D-N.C. “I believe in the wisdom of this course and want to know how the ICE plans to make more progress.”
Price said that even though immigration enforcement agencies had achieved relative success, more had to be done to deport aliens who have committed criminal offenses. He said ICE, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, has increased non-criminal deportations by 400 percent since 2002 but criminal deportations by only 60 percent.
“Secretary [Janet] Napolitano has made the identification and removal of criminal aliens a top priority for ICE,” said David Venturella, executive director of Secure Communities, an ICE program intended to enhance federal-local cooperation in detaining and deporting immigrants with criminal records. “We are focusing on improving information sharing to more quickly identify criminal aliens.”
Venturella said it was difficult to identify all criminal aliens because of the excessive speed at which criminals are processed in local and state prisons. Price agreed, saying that only 14 percent of criminals in local prisons are screened, compared with 100 percent of inmates screened at state prisons.
Workforce enforcement efforts have been aided by the department’s E-Verify, an electronic screening system that immigration officials said identifies workers who are not legally allowed to work in the country. The officials said they want to continue to work on the accuracy and fairness of the system. There are currently 63,592 companies enrolled in E-Verify.
Rep. Harold Rogers., R-Ky., praised the E-Verify efforts but warned that making the deportation of criminal aliens a priority should not interfere with the task of deporting non-criminal aliens. He called the emphasis on deporting criminal aliens a “poorly veiled proxy for immigration reform.”
He pointed to reports that ICE has released 28 confirmed illegal immigrants who were arrested during a raid in northwest Washington and has given 24 of them work permits.
“Recent calls from the administration and others to re-prioritize, apply greater scrutiny and redirect valuable ICE resources toward criminal alien investigations come at the detriment of other critical functions,” Rogers said.
But Venturella said the attempt to establish new priorities has not hindered other efforts to combat illegal immigration. “We have added agents—border patrol agents; it has not diminished our efforts on catching and releasing [returning to their home countries] illegal immigrants.”
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