Revolving door at border

SAN DIEGO — Handcuffed and shackled with their pockets pulled inside out, more than 150 illegal aliens are loaded onto an airplane every night, bound for detention centers in the United States to await deportation orders to their home countries.

Searched by a cadre of uniformed federal agents and encircled by heavily armed officers, they are herded off buses in the dead of night on an isolated tarmac at San Diego International Airport, where they silently shuffle single file on board a waiting MD-82 jetliner.

Some never have been on an airplane. Others have made the trip before. Many will be back.

A monthlong investigation by The Washington Times found that a shortage of detention space and lack of manpower force federal authorities to regularly release illegal aliens back on the streets of America — and often to ignore requests to pick up illegals in the custody of state and local officials.

“There’s no question we need more detention space, more people and more equipment to get the job done,” said J. Michael Vaughn, a detention and deportation supervisor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles. His processing center handles between 3,000 and 4,500 illegals a month.

“If we are the final step in an immigration-enforcement system that seeks to remove from the country those people who do not legally belong, we need some help. I assure you: The battle is being fought right here,” Mr. Vaughn said.

ICE, hamstrung by long-standing budgetary constraints that have left its detention and removal program seriously undermanned and underfunded, has 20,000 beds available at ICE-managed and -contracted detention centers nationwide — not enough to house the aliens in custody on a daily basis.

And that shortfall comes at a time when ICE, led by the agency’s 18 fugitive operations squads, is vigorously hunting 80,000 criminal aliens and more than 320,000 “absconders,” foreign nationals who were ordered deported but disappeared. Meantime, the Border Patrol is expected to arrest a million illegal aliens this year.

As for the estimated 8 million to 12 million illegals living and working in the United States, no one is really trying to find them. Even if anyone was, there is no place to put them.

Hundreds of Mexican nationals, arrested everyday by federal authorities as they try to illegally enter the United States and by state and local police during routine crime investigations, are released back onto American or to the Mexican side of border towns because of the detention-space shortage.

Frustrated Border Patrol agents call the system “catch and release,” and they, along with state and local police, say ICE detention officials consistently turn away aliens who they’ve apprehended, citing a lack of manpower or space.

Many released illegals get written notices to appear for an immigration hearing, although records show that more than 85 percent never appear. Those notices are referred to by ICE and Border Patrol agents as “run letters.”

The lack of detention space has created a hazardous situation for agents in the field, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents the agency’s 10,000 nonsupervisory agents.

Mr. Bonner said the number of illegals being apprehended is so high that many are being detained for only a few hours before being released — only to be rearrested later.

State and local authorities who house illegal aliens for an average payment of about $54 a day release many of them because detention bills are going unpaid. Others complain that “unrealistic detention standards” imposed by the federal government, such as special ethnic meals and legal libraries, have made it impossible to house the aliens.

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