Illegal immigrant repatriation cost, effectiveness questioned

By Daniel Gonzalez
The Arizona Republic
21 August 2011

The Department of Homeland Security continues to spend millions of dollars flying illegal immigrants caught along the Arizona border back to Mexico each summer even though government officials and humanitarian groups question whether the program is effective or worth the cost.

The agency has spent more than $85 million over the past eight years to transport Mexican illegal immigrants far beyond the border in a humanitarian effort aimed at saving lives by deterring migrants from making another dangerous border crossing.

But it has no real way to gauge the value of the program.

Though the department defends its repatriation flights, officials chose not to act on recommendations by government auditors to measure whether the program is effective.

Both DHS and Mexican officials insist it works. They say that flying thousands of apprehended migrants 1,100 miles into Mexico instead of simply dropping them off at the border makes the migrants less likely to hook up again with human smugglers and try to cross through Arizona’s rugged, remote desert, where over the years hundreds of migrants have died in the brutal summer heat.

But some humanitarian groups say it is a waste of money because migrant deaths have continued to rise, and the Government Accountability Office has been critical of the lack of accountability.

DHS officials say they don’t set specific performance targets for the program, which was created in cooperation with the Mexican government, because it would be counterproductive to try to measure its effectiveness in the same way as other border-enforcement strategies. They say its intent is humanitarian and not specifically an enforcement mechanism.

Since 2004, the government has repatriated 102,201 migrants to Mexico under the program, including 23,384 last year, the highest number of any year, according to figures released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Government data shows that migrant deaths in Arizona have gone up 75 percent in that time. But because the government maintains only partial records of what happens to people flown home, there is no way to know how many of them later die attempting to return.

The available information shows at least some do return.

Records obtained by The Arizona Republic show that within months, hundreds of the migrants flown back to Mexico – each at a cost of more than $500 – are caught crossing illegally again.

That, says one non-government humanitarian group, is evidence that the program has not been effective.

“We believe (the flights) are a wasteful use of money,” said Jaime Farrant, policy director for the Border Action Network, a Tucson-based human-rights group that advocates for immigrants.

Humanitarian groups say the program fails to address the larger reasons migrants risk their lives crossing the border.

The flights known as the Mexican Interior Repatriation Program, which operate for only a limited period in the summer, began again this year on July 11 and will continue once daily until Sept. 28. The government is expected to spend $9 million to $11 million on the program this year, ICE officials have said.

Ordinarily, illegal immigrants from Mexico apprehended by the Border Patrol are driven to the U.S. side of the border, where agents watch as they walk back to Mexico through entry ports. Once on the other side, many simply reconnect with smugglers and attempt to re-enter illegally.

The program is designed to identify migrants from states beyond the border. They are voluntarily flown deep inside Mexico and given bus tickets to their hometowns.

The entire cost of transportation is borne by the U.S. government.

Rarely mentioned

For months, President Barack Obama and members of his administration have touted statistics that demonstrate how his commitment to beefing up security and cracking down on illegal immigrants has resulted in a safer border and a sharp decrease in apprehensions along the southwestern border.

One initiative they usually don’t mention is the Mexican Interior Repatriation Program.

DHS officials say the primary intent of the program is to save lives and to break the connection between migrants and the smugglers who help lead them across the border and into Arizona.

But statistics do not show the kind of significant improvements that the administration is able to cite in other areas of border security: From fiscal 2008 to 2010, apprehensions are down 36 percent, reflecting fewer crossings, and seizures of drugs are up 31 percent, a sign of heightened patrols.

In fiscal year 2004, the year the repatriation program started, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector tallied 142 migrant deaths. Since then, the number of deaths has fluctuated, going down occasionally but rising most years. Last year, the Border Patrol counted 249 in the Tucson Sector, a record high. The sector covers most of Arizona’s 372.5-mile border with Mexico.

So far this year, the sector has logged 132 migrant deaths, down 38 percent compared with the same period last year.

In all, a total of 1,496 migrants have perished in the Tucson Sector over the past eight fiscal years, the Border Patrol said.

Mexican officials and some immigrant groups say deaths have gone up because tighter border enforcement has pushed smugglers and migrants into more-remote and more-dangerous routes through the desert.

The program attempts to prevent illegal migrants from risking a repeat crossing, but data shows some of those flown back to Mexico on U.S.-funded flights often return to the border and try again.

Last year, more than 12 percent of the 23,384 migrants flown back to Mexico were rearrested by the Border Patrol just during the months the program was in operation. The year before, 6.5 percent of the 10,550 participants were rearrested during the summer, while the program was running, the Border Patrol said.

And in fiscal year 2008, nearly 10 percent of the 18,464 participants were rearrested during the course of the program, the Border Patrol said.

Border Patrol figures show that the program’s participants were arrested at lower rates trying to re-enter the U.S. than the Tucson Sector’s overall 30 percent recidivism rate, at least while the program was in operation.

But it is impossible to fully measure the program’s overall effectiveness because the Border Patrol would provide recidivism rates for the program only for fiscal years 2008-10, and only for the weeks the program was in operation. The Arizona Republic requested recidivism rates for all eight years of the program, not just the three provided. The Republic also asked for complete recidivism rates showing how often the program’s participants were rearrested by the Border Patrol at any time, not just during the program’s operation.

The Border Patrol turned down those requests.

Andy Adame, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson, said the agency did not formally track recidivism rates during the first five years of the program. And during the last three years, the Border Patrol tracked participants only while the program was operating. Trying to track all 102,201 participants retroactively since fiscal year 2004 would be “a logistical nightmare,” Adame said.

On average, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is apprehending about 220 migrants a day this summer. Of those, about 130 to 150 are being flown back to Mexico each day, he said.

The remaining 70 to 90 are prosecuted under an 8-month-old program that formally charges most migrants apprehended at the border with illegal entry. Once prosecuted, they are deported and risk jail time or being banned from the U.S. if caught re-entering.

After being apprehended by Border Patrol agents out in the desert, migrants are driven to one of eight Border Patrol stations in the Tucson Sector where their fingerprints are run through a computer database to check for criminal history or outstanding warrants.

Those without either, and who are from states other than neighboring Sonora, are given the option of being flown back to Mexico. They are interviewed by Mexican consular officials at the Border Patrol station in Nogales to ensure that they are participating voluntarily.

The migrants are then driven to the Tucson airport and flown to Mexico City on chartered flights, typically within 24 hours. Once in Mexico, they are given bus tickets to their hometowns.

“We encourage people to take the (flights) to get them out of the smuggling cycle,” Adame said. “The primary objective of the (program) is to break that smuggling cycle. We are looking at that first: Less people in the desert (means) less chance of people dying out there. Keeping people away from the border is what we are trying to do with the MIRP program.”

Results not tracked

A 2010 Government Accountability Office review of the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-smuggling operations along the Southwest border faulted ICE for failing to track how effective the program is in achieving its goals.

Without proper monitoring, “ICE does not know the effectiveness of its efforts related to MIRP at deterring individuals from illegally returning to the United States,” the report said.

According to the report, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not agree with the report’s recommendation to establish procedures for measuring results.

DHS officials believed that establishing such measures “would shift its focus away from the program’s original lifesaving intent,” the report said.

Vincent Picard, a spokesman for ICE in Phoenix, said in an e-mail that the agency continues to stand by that position.

The program was designed as a bilateral effort between the United States and Mexico to reduce the loss of human life and to reduce the potential for exploitation of illegal migrants by human-smuggling organizations, he said.

“The mission of MIRP is humanitarian in focus and ICE believes that assigning removal goals would undermine the spirit by which the program was conceived with Mexico,” Picard said in the e-mail. “ICE does not have separate performance measures specific to MIRP; however, MIRP returns contribute to overall ICE performance targets for removals and returns.”

Rolando Garcia-Alonso, coordinator of international relations for Mexico’s National Migration Institute in Mexico City, said he believes the program is effective because it greatly reduces the chances migrants will try to cross again.

He said at least 80 percent of migrants who are repatriated at the border simply reconnect with smugglers and turn around and try to cross again. Each time they try, they are more fatigued, and therefore the chance of dying increases.

Repatriating migrants at the border “is a complete failure,” he said.

On the other hand, though some migrants flown to the interior of Mexico try to cross again, most don’t, he said.

“For me, that is a huge success,” he said.

He attributed the increase in migrant deaths since 2004 to migrants and smuggling organizations taking more-remote and more-hazardous routes through the desert in order to evade stepped-up border security in the U.S.

Without the program, “there would be even bigger” numbers of migrant deaths, he said.

Garcia-Alonso said the Mexican government incurs some of the cost of the program. While the United States pays for the flights and bus tickets, the Mexican government covers the cost of providing staff from the Mexican consulate in Tucson to interview migrants before they board the flights. The Mexican government also incurs costs interviewing migrants when they arrive in Mexico City, and pays for public programs to help migrants find jobs or start businesses so they will be less likely to cross again.

Adam Aguirre, a spokesman for No More Deaths, a Tucson-based group that provides water and other humanitarian aid to migrants found in distress near the border, called the program a “quick fix” to a much larger problem.

Without more legal channels to enter the U.S., he said, migrants will continue to risk their lives crossing illegally as long as there are good-paying jobs available in the U.S. and a lack of them in Mexico.

“As far as quick fixes, anything like this is going to be inadequate,” Aquirre said of the flights. “The fact of the matter is there are no quick fixes.”

http://tucsoncitizen.com/arizona-news/author/daniel-gonzalez/

Enforcement and deportation costs skyrocket

Dispatch investigation: Deportation Nation (Part 3/3)
By Stephanie Czekalinski
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
December 28, 2010

It would cost each U.S. taxpayer about $500 to deport all 11.1 million immigrants estimated to be living here without permission.

On average, each deportation cost taxpayers more than $6,000 in 2010, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget numbers.

The amount Americans spend annually to detain and deport immigrants increased by more than 100 percent since 2005, to $2.55 billion in 2010. During the same period, the number of people deported more than doubled, to more than 390,000.

The Department of Homeland Security says the investment to step up enforcement of federal immigration laws has been worth it.

The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has dropped from 12 million in March 2007 to 11.1 million in March 2009, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C.

Homeland Security officials say the decrease is because of increased deportations and more funding for agents, investigators and prosecutors. But others say the national economic downturn has slowed the flow of illegal immigration.

Immigrant-rights activists question whether the mass deportations are money well spent. Most illegal immigrants are here to build productive lives and contribute to the economy, said Ruben Castilla Herrera of the Ohio Action Circle, a statewide grass-roots immigration-rights coalition.

Studies disagree about whether illegal immigrants are a net benefit to or drain on the U.S. economy.

According to the conservative research group the Heritage Foundation, $100billion in annual welfare spending goes to households headed by immigrants with high-school degrees or less. If illegal immigrants were given a path to citizenship, the welfare system would be flooded with new recipients, the Heritage Foundation says.

On the other side, the Immigration Policy Center, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., says legalizing the 11.1 million undocumented immigrants would increase the country's gross domestic product by $1.5trillion over 10 years.

No one disagrees that it costs money to deport someone. In some cases, taxpayers pay to repeatedly deport the same individuals, who keep sneaking back into the U.S.

Stepped-up prosecution

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws, has been referring re-entry cases to prosecutors in the hope that the prospect of prison time will send illegal immigrants a message: Don't come back.

Prosecuting and imprisoning illegal immigrants takes up much of the federal court system's time.

Almost half the cases prosecuted in federal courts during the first 11months of 2010 were immigration-related, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which gathers and analyzes data from public agencies.

Federal courts heard more cases that involved illegally entering the country, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail for the first offense, than for any other crime, including drug offenses.

In February, Judge Sam Sparks of U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas, questioned prosecutors about the value of prosecuting people with no "significant criminal history" for immigration-law violations. His docket, like many others in federal courts across the country, was awash in immigration-related cases.

The cost of prosecuting immigrants with no criminal history other than re-entering the country, rather than deporting them again, "is simply mind-boggling," Sparks wrote."The U.S. Attorney's policy of prosecuting all aliens presents a cost to the American taxpayer at this time that is neither meritorious nor reasonable."

The increased prosecutions have not put a burden on prosecutors in southern Ohio, said Vipal J. Patel, district criminal chief for the U.S. attorney's office.

Nationwide, the number of criminal immigration convictions in federal courts in August was up more than 60 percent over the same period five years ago, according to TRAC. The No. 1 charge was sneaking back into the country after being deported.

Immigrants with no criminal history face a maximum of two years in prison if convicted of re-entry. Those who have committed significant crimes can face a maximum of 20 years.

In November, about 11 percent of people serving time in federal prisons had been convicted of immigration-law violations, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

It costs about $24,000 annually to hold someone in federal prison, according to a budget released by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2009. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction says it cost about the same to keep someone for a year in Ohio prisons in 2010.

The lure of family

Ten-year-old Jamie Aristigue stood in front of about 150 people on the Statehouse lawn one afternoon in July and cried.

Her father, Fernando Aristigue, had "been taken away from us and is in jail," she said.

Jamie, her sister, Frida, 5, and her mother, Magali Cruz, 29, were participating in a faith-based rally that pushed for immigration reform.

ICE agents had detained Fernando Aristigue at the family's Westerville apartment in June.

He has been deported six times since 2005. He has returned each time.

Instead of simply deporting Aristigue a seventh time, federal prosecutors charged him with illegally re-entering the country, a felony.

Aristigue, 36, had never been convicted of breaking immigration law or any other law, according to court documents.

While taxpayers are footing the bill for deportations and imprisonment, illegal immigrants and their families, including their U.S. citizen children, also pay a price.

In November, the Aristigues' apartment was vacant. A clerk in a nearby Latino grocery remembered the family.

"It was a very sad case," said the clerk, who asked not to be identified. "There are a lot of very sad cases."

It's easy to understand why Aristigue risked federal prosecution, he said. Since Aristigue's arrest, his wife and daughters have returned to Mexico.

But there will be no reunion anytime soon. If a U.S. judge gives Aristigue the maximum sentence, it will be two years before he can join his family.

Cost beyond dollars

About 10 years ago, W. Tom Large was involved in a vehicle crash with an illegal immigrant. Both are still paying the price.

"It was like being in an explosion," said Large, 65, a lifelong Ohio resident.

Luis Valente De La Paz-Flores was driving north on Sawmill Parkway in a Chevrolet Astro van when he ran a red light and struck Large's Ford Expedition, which was heading west on Powell Road, Large said.

Valente, who prosecutors said was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the crash, pleaded guilty to vehicular assault and was deported to Mexico in 2001 after spending nine months in jail.

Large struggled but was able to keep his special-event business afloat while he recuperated. His SUV was totaled in the crash, and he battled his insurance company to cover his medical bills, he said.

But Large hadn't heard the last of Valente.

"He's back?" Large said after a Dispatch reporter told him that Valente had been arrested this summer in the University District.

"I figured he was going to be back," Large said.

Federal immigration authorities found Valente, now 33, in August and charged him with re-entering the country after being deported, a felony punishable by up to a $250,000 fine and 20 years in prison.

Valente is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, awaiting trial. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

Although Large said he harbors no animosity toward Valente, he's reminded of him often.

Before the accident, Large, who has a black belt in karate, lived a life full of physical activity. Today, his joints ache and stiffen when he sits, and he walks with a limp.

"I've had nothing but pain since," he said.

Comprehensive fix

Police, activists on both sides, immigration lawyers and citizens of the United States and countries around the world have been begging legislators for years to reform the broken, contradictory and complex system of laws that govern immigration to the United States.

Attempts by some states to define how local law-enforcement agencies and ICE work together have become flashpoints in the national brawl over illegal immigration.

In July, a federal judge blocked some of the most controversial sections of an immigration law in Arizona - considered among the strictest in the nation - which required police to ask suspected illegal immigrants for their immigration papers in the course of enforcing other laws.

Legislators in Ohio are closely watching what's going on in Arizona.

Rep. Courtney Eric Combs, a Republican from Hamilton, said he plans to approach other members of the legislature about passing a law that would incorporate the elements of Arizona's law that were deemed constitutional.

If the Ohio legislature won't act, he said, there are plans to put the issue on the statewide ballot.

In Ohio and across the country, local and state law-enforcement officers routinely arrest illegal immigrants for various offenses, then turn them over to immigration authorities for deportation.

Since 2002, almost 2,000 people have been transferred from the Franklin County jail to ICE custody.

Those opposed to illegal immigration say it's necessary to root out dangerous criminals, and to find and remove immigrants living illegally in the United States. Immigrants-rights advocates say the practice is outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, begets racial profiling and breeds distrust of police within ethnic communities.

What's needed is federal immigration reform, said David Leopold, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

"We need a comprehensive fix, and Congress needs to do it," he said.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/12/28/enforcement-and-deportation-costs-skyrocket.html?sid=101