Patterico's Pontifications

3/28/2007

L.A. County Could Deport 34,000 Criminals with Sufficient Resources

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General,Immigration — Patterico @ 12:00 am



With sufficient resources, Los Angeles County could identify and deport more than 34,000 criminals a year who have been residing in the country illegally, according to figures recently reported in the Los Angeles Times.

Don’t get me wrong . . . that’s not the way the paper reported it. But the figures are there, in this recent article. You have to wade through some statistics from Orange County first:

Ten percent of inmates arriving in the Orange County sheriff’s jail system during the first five weeks of a new screening program were found to be likely illegal immigrants and were set to face hearings that could result in their deportation.

The statistics were from Jan. 19 to Feb. 25, as Sheriff Michael S. Carona began requiring that jail deputies screen all foreign nationals for immigration violations.

The findings come as law enforcement agencies around Southern California and beyond are trying to determine how many of their inmates are here illegally and should be deported.

By the fourth paragraph, we work our way around to Los Angeles County, where the percentage of suspected illegals in jail is estimated to be over 20%:

In Los Angeles County, an increase in screeners has nearly doubled the number of inmates identified as illegal immigrants, from 3,050 in 2005 to 5,829 last year. But the county and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are screening only a fraction of the inmates in Los Angeles County jails. Last year, screeners interviewed nearly 10,000 of the 170,000 inmates who went through L.A. County jails, estimating that more than 20% of the jail population was in the country illegally.

More than 20% of 170,000 are thought to be illegal! If we deported them all, we’d be getting more than 34,000 criminals out of Los Angeles County.

So how could we devote more resources to the problem? In Orange County, sheriff’s deputies do the original screening — which allows them to screen all inmates:

By contrast, Orange County now screens all inmates entering the jails. Jail deputies booked 6,160 people from throughout the county during the period, and they found that 639 did not appear to have legal status in the United States. They will be referred to ICE after their cases go through the legal system and they serve any resulting prison time.

Of those detained for ICE, 425 were arrested on suspicion of felonies — 56 of them on suspicion of aggravated felonies — and 214 for alleged misdemeanors.

This certainly makes it sound as though having sheriff’s deputies do immigration screening is helping Orange County officials catch more criminals residing here illegally. Interestingly, Michael Hiltzik disputed this last year. In a column about the Mayor of Costa Mesa’s plan to have the Sheriff’s Department help ICE do immigration screening of jail inmates, Hiltzik assuried L.A. Times readers that all felony suspects were already being checked:

What’s often lost in the debate is how ineffective the mayor’s program is likely to be. The current plan is for the city to participate in a program that Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona is trying to set up with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. But the county program hasn’t been accepted by ICE despite a year of talks, and nobody knows when it will be. In current practice, the Sheriff’s Department holds felony suspects thought to be illegal immigrants – including those arrested in Costa Mesa – in the county jail, where ICE agents check them out.

A little number-crunching, using numbers from recent L.A. Times articles, shows this claim to be wildly untrue — as I argued at the time.

According to the recent article, in five weeks, Orange County law enforcement booked and checked the immigration status of 6,160 people — an average of 1232 inmates per week, or roughly 5000 checked a month. In that same five weeks, they found 639 illegals in the jail, 425 (two-thirds) of which were alleged felons — an average of 85 suspected felons a week, or about 340 per month. Unless illegal immigrants commit felonies on a disproportionately greater basis than non-illegals (which I seriously doubt), then 2/3 of the 6,160 inmates checked were booked on felony charges. That’s about 4,065 imnates over the five-week period, meaning that about 3300 inmates booked on felony charges flow through the jail every month.

The L.A. Times reported in January:

Orange County Jail officials ran immigration checks on about 200 foreign-born inmates a month in 2005, the latest available figures.

Assuming that the general arrest rate was about the same in 2005 as today, these figures mean that about 3300 felony suspects flowed into Orange County jails every month in 2005 — and officials checked the immigration status of only about 200, or 6 percent.

The bottom line: Hiltzik claimed that Orange County officials were checking the immigration status of all felony suspects — and instead they were checking the status of only about 6 percent.

Now they are checking all of them. And Orange County is reaping the benefits.

What would it mean to Los Angeles to be able to able to deport 34,000 criminals a year? How many homes and businesses would not be burglarized? How many people would not be raped or robbed or shot?

How many people would not be killed?

This story should have been the lead story in the paper in which it appeared, and the first sentence should have read something like the first sentence of this post.

But P.C. orthodoxy would never allow that. So you’ll have to get the real analysis here.

All I can ask is that you spread the word.

22 Responses to “L.A. County Could Deport 34,000 Criminals with Sufficient Resources”

  1. See, I don’t get stuff like this. I mean, I grew up in the O.C., right? So when people get all started up on deportations and sealing the border I always ask them who does their gardening and then they get into the ‘well, uh’s. You know?

    But, violent criminals not being deported? I mean, you have somebody in jail and you don’t bother to check their immigration status? How can this be? Bizarre! Stupid! Dangerous!

    David N. Scott (71e316)

  2. OK, I got excited. But some of this stuff is just so mind-boggling…

    David N. Scott (71e316)

  3. …With sufficient resources

    Per the Greyhound website, the cost of a bus ticket from Los Angeles to Tijuana Mexico is $25.00 per person. Thirty-four thousand criminals per year equals about 100 criminals per day, or about two bus loads per day to Tijuana. So for approximately $850,000 per year, LA could export these 34,000 criminals to Mexico. I estimate it costs about $50,000 per year per LA policeman, so the annual cost of exporting these criminals to Tijuana is approximately equal to the cost of 17 LA policeman. Their Union will not agree, but it is obvious that is far more beneficial to society to reduce the number of policeman by 17 and use these these funds to deport 34,000 criminals (2,000 criminals per policeman per year).

    Due to the resulting reduction in crime, LA could save tens of million of dollars per year, over time, it could save hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So the next time you hear about a stolen car, an assault, a rape or a murder, there is a fair chance it could have been prevented for about $25.00. But the liberals will never allow these deportations since deporting illegal aliens is “discrimination” and a “hate crime.”

    Perfect Sense (b6ec8c)

  4. You want PC? Nothing beat this AM “reporting” of the riots in Paris. Only a Reuters stringer in Australia reports that the rioters were Black and Muslim. ONLY ONE SINGLE REPORT out of 186 on Google. So when you read about the Paris subway riot today and end up think white “youth” you will be wrong again

    Howard Veit (4ba8d4)

  5. Julie’s favorite husband wrote:

    So when people get all started up on deportations and sealing the border I always ask them who does their gardening and then they get into the ‘well, uh’s. You know?

    Well, yes, of course. But people get mad at me when I say that we have illegal immigration because we want illegal immigration.

    Dana (3e4784)

  6. To add to what makes Perfect Sense, they should be deported after they serve the maximum sentence, not instead of being convicted and sentenced.

    Dana (3e4784)

  7. Can we deport the other 146,000 criminals as well?

    Though I’d ask….

    EricPWJohnson (695c44)

  8. Deporting criminals makes them someone else’s problem.

    Until they reenter the country.

    Long term, I would argue that we are better off keeping them in our jails until they have served their sentence and deporting them afterwards.

    LarryD (336e87)

  9. I agree with that, of course. But you have to know they’re illegal to deport them afterwards. In L.A., we are letting the vast majority go.

    Patterico (9bb77c)

  10. Even a legal “green card” permanent resident is deportable for having committed a criminal offense in the United States

    nk (483a52)

  11. Again this speaks to the lack of border enforcement and the feds ignoring of this – whether the illegal immigrant criminals are deported before or after serving their time, what is to stop them from re-entering the United States after their deportation? It seems that all necessary components need to be effectively in place (here and at the borders) in order to rid the country of these felons for good. If not, then its a shell game that will go on endlessly.

    (I note there is another Dana posting here, too… I am the Dana from CW’s….)

    Dana (3c831e)

  12. It could be argued that we’re better off keeping the illegal alien prisoner here after he is released instead of deporting him because he’ll just return the next day but unlike others who are released from prison, the system won’t be able to keep tabs on him with probation.

    That’s how F’ed up the situation is. All viable solutions are draconian and we currently have a president who stepped in as governor to prevent the US from asking Mexico to crack down on border crime because the Mexican smugglers were just trying to feed their families.

    J Curtis (d21251)

  13. We in West Texas have lived with illegal immigration for years. Some would argue we’ve benefited from cheap labor but taxpayers realize the costs far outweigh the benefits. Here’s a 1998 article that details efforts by West Texas sheriffs who organized a joint task force called STAR to do the Border Patrol’s job for it:

    U.S. Border Patrol agents in West Texas are protesting a weekend drug interdiction and training exercise by at least two dozen county sheriff’s deputies along the Rio Grande in Presidio County, site of the 1997 fatal shooting of a teen-age goatherd by a U.S. Marine anti-drug patrol. Jerry Agan, deputy chief of the Border Patrol’s Marfa sector, said the sheriffs’ group, operating under the acronym STAR, has refused to inform federal agents of the locations of their exercise, and ignored warnings by the federal agency, which has legal jurisdiction over drug smuggling and illegal immigration along American borders.

    “Our big concern is that you have two armed law enforcement agencies operating along the border, and that seems like a pretty volatile situation to me,” Agan said. “I don’t know what level of expertise or training these deputies have.”

    ***

    The Border Patrol’s Agan notified his regional headquarters in Dallas after learning of the planned exercise two weeks ago. But he was informed that the federal government has no power to intervene in county police operations.

    The training exercises, which also include search and rescue training, are defended by Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez and Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter, a leader in the formation of the Sheriffs of Texas Agreed Response team or STAR. Dominguez has given temporary Presidio County deputy status to the law enforcement officers coming in from other counties to allow them to make arrests in Presidio County, which includes 132 miles of the Texas-Mexico border.

    STAR was formed after the April 1997 stand-off between law enforcement officers and an armed band of anti-government activists called the Republic of Texas, Painter said. It was during that incident in Fort Davis that West Texas sheriffs realized they needed to plan how to coordinate their responses to terrorism or natural disasters.

    In recent months, 35 to 40 counties have joined STAR, which receives no state or federal funding, Painter said. Asked why deputies from urban Midland County (near New Mexico) would need training along the border, Painter said, “If we shut off the narcotics at the border, they can’t make it up to here.”

    The deputies are being paid for the weekend training, the third such exercise under STAR. He noted that the training was helpful after recent flooding in South Texas, when a team of deputies from Midland and other STAR counties traveled to Del Rio to help with rescues, looting prevention and the manning of the county jail. “If I had a situation here, a terrorist attack on the oil fields, or a tornado, all I have to do is call (on STAR members), and my citizens would get the help they need.”

    STAR was ultimately disbanded but the problems remain.

    DRJ (c4368f)

  14. Remember that whenever you hear a Congresscritter complain about ‘catch and release’, they are the ones paying the bill. If Congress doesn’t allocate the money on the Federal side it doesn’t get done. But billions in pork? Why yes! Lots of money for lobbyists, friends and relatives, brown nosers, and the such like.

    But pay to secure the Union, which is their job?

    No, they would much rather complain the job isn’t getting done when they are the ones supposed to do it.

    ajacksonian (87eccd)

  15. Patterico:

    Now, you know how pro-immigration I am. I have argued many times that the vast majority of “illegal aliens” came here for perfectly honorable reasons and should not be deported en masse.

    But (prepare for a shock) I agree with you 100% that anybody incarcerated for a crime who is illegally resident in the United States should (a) first serve his complete sentence, then (b) upon release, be deported… but not before a biometric scan, so we can keep him out in the future.

    Immigrants in general, and especially those here illegally, have an obvious duty to keep out of trouble… even to the extent of hanging around with thugs and thieves who might get raided. I have no sympathy for those who get busted.

    Dafydd

    Dafydd (445647)

  16. Wasn’t there a lawsuit in California over the fact that there is not enough room and the jails are way overcrowded? If LA county could deport 34,000 a year alone, how about the rest of California? Wouldn’t that relieve the overcrowding?

    kimsch (127da6)

  17. wouldn’t they just come back?

    marc (4decbd)

  18. Marc,

    Probably but I think it’s getting marginally harder and/or more expensive to come back and to find employment that is secure. In addition, they say they’ve stopped “catch and release” so that helps, too.

    DRJ (8b9d41)

  19. This is one more reason we need to build a 2,000 mile fence between the US and Mexico. For $4 Billion we could have a double row fence repleat with anti-vehicle ditches, razor wire, security cameras and an access road in the middle.

    The beauty of a fence is that it will be much harder for determined people, whether they are illegals, drug smugglers, or terrorists to get in. Right now the most motivated crossers just walk an extra 50 mile to get in. Not a big deal for a young criminal. With a fence they will have to fly in, something they can’t do because they will never get past the fingerprint check.

    Yes, fences do work. That’s why we put them around our prisons.

    slapdash (de5a83)

  20. […] — especially crimes that endanger people’s lives. In my home town of Los Angeles alone, 34,000 illegal aliens flow through county jails every year — yet only a fraction of that number is identified and deported. This sickening failure is […]

    Hot Air » Blog Archive » “Deport the Criminals First” — An Illegal Alien Drunk Driver Snuffs Out Three Human Lives in Texas (d4224a)

  21. Using illegal aliens for gardening, lawn care, etc. may look cheap. However, who pays the health car bills for the illegals? Who pays for the schools? Who pays for the jails when their kids aren’t content to mow lawns but lack the skills for better paid work. The crime rate leaps 8 fold from the first to the second generation. See “Seeing Today’s Immigrants Straight” (http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigration_reform.html) for a “comprehensive” article on what kind of future our nation is importing by not enforcing our immigration laws.

    Peter Schaeffer (7dfa6d)

  22. This is actually very weak. Europe jails illegal immigrants for 18 months. Check this article from Washinton Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061800931.html?hpid=moreheadlines

    al (5f2aa2)


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