MORE IMMIGRANTS ARE DEPORTED AS OFFICIALS' POWER INCREASES

Equipped with new powers to turn away immigrants at the borders, and
with more jail space available for those people they arrest inside the
country, immigration officials in New York City have deported more
than 4,000 people in the last year, an increase of 12 percent over the
previous year.

Nationwide, nearly 177,000 people were deported or sent back to their
home countries for criminal or noncriminal offenses during the 1999
fiscal year, an increase of 3 percent, according to a report released
on Friday by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Of those, 62,000 people had committed, at some point during their
residence in the United States, one of the crimes that are grounds for
deportation. The agency said that about half of those deported had
been convicted on drug charges. Most of the others had been convicted
of assault, burglary or violating immigration laws. Almost 115,000
people were deported or turned away because they were in the country
illegally or had tried to enter with false documents.

The higher numbers were likely to please those in Congress who have
accused the agency of doing too little to find and deport aliens with
criminal records and false documents. The immigration service
estimates that 500,000 immigrants are in the country illegally,
although it has been using the same estimated number for more than
three years.

But advocates for immigrants said the increase seemed to justify their
fears about a 1996 law that gave the I.N.S. an array of new
enforcement tools, including the right to deport people quickly upon
their arrival at an airport or land border without allowing them a
lawyer or a judicial hearing.

That process is called expedited removal. It is used to turn away not
only people with false documents, but also those who request asylum
when they arrive. The agency did not provide figures for the New York
region airports alone, but it said that more than 89,000 people at all
the nation's borders had been the subjects of expedited removal in the
last year, an increase of 16 percent.

"That is really frightening," said Elisa Massimino, director of the
Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "This is
an administration who opposed expedited removal and unfortunately now
embraced it to improve the deportation numbers. We are afraid of what
this portends for refugees seeking asylum here."

Immigration officials said that the increase in deportations was the
result in part of the success of their efforts to identify criminals
who are not citizens while they are serving their prison sentences.
Nearly 20,000 people were deported straight from state and Federal
prisons in the last year, an increase of nearly 45 percent.

In that same time period, the agency also received about $80 million
in a special appropriation -- bringing its deportation budget to $809
million -- to expand its detention beds to about 17,500 and bring its
staff of enforcement officers up to 15,000.

"The greater our capacity to detain, the greater our capacity to
remove," said Russell A. Bergeron Jr., an agency spokesman. "If you
cannot detain, odds are you will not remove them."

He said the field offices that look for undocumented immigrants
generally will not initiate a raid on a workplace, for example, if
there is not enough space to detain people awaiting
deportation.

The jump in deportations in the New York district paralleled increases
at other major gateway cities. San Francisco, for example, deported 23
percent more people and Houston 29 percent in the last year.

Since 1997, the agency has set annual targets for deporting illegal
and criminal aliens. Each year, it has surpassed its goal, which for
the 1999 fiscal year was 120,000.