Federal officials have not been able to keep up with Prince William County’s 10-month crackdown on illegal immigrants who commit crimes. If the federal agency in charge of immigration enforcement can’t handle deportations from just one county, how are they enforcing the law in the other 3,076 counties nationwide?
With 15,000 employees and a budget of $5.6 billion, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the second-largest investigative agency in the federal government, overshadowed only by the FBI. Last July, Prince William supervisors instituted one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration policies in the nation. Police officers received training under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, giving them legal authority to arrest and detain illegals accused of breaking state and local laws. About a quarter of the 1,200 inmates bookedat the Prince William jail every month are foreign-born, but because of budgetary limitations, not all are checked for immigration status.
Under a 2007 contract with ICE, those found guilty of criminal behavior each month would be picked up from the jail within 72 hours and deported. Except it was taking weeks — not days — for ICE to pick up the average 73 inmates per month held for deportation, almost twice the number originally estimated. The delay put additional stress on the already overcrowded jail and cost the county $3 million in extra transportation and processing costs. Legal residents had to be shipped to other detention centers in the state, making it more difficult for family members and attorneys to visit.
Even though the seven members of the county’s Criminal Alien Unit did the bulk of ICE’s work by identifying and detaining criminal aliens, ICE didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. Only after complaints from Jail Board Chairman Patrick Hurd and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-10th — who both pointed out that ICE was not fulfilling its contractual responsibilities — did the situation improve. ICE now promises to make pickups in Virginia’s second-largest county at least twice a week.
Although the larger issue of illegal immigration remains controversial, almost everyone agrees foreign criminals should not be allowed to remain in the United States. Yet as officials in Prince William discovered, the federal government’s sorry record of removing murderers, rapists and thieves from local communities is on a par with its equally egregious failure to keep them out of the country in the first place.
