DEPORTED CRIMINALS STREAM BACK INTO THE U.S. BY THE THOUSANDS

Hector Feliz-Esparza, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, was
deported on Jan. 8, 1997, following his conviction in Redwood City on drug
and weapons charges.

Five months later, Feliz-Esparza was arrested in the Bay Area again for
drunk driving. He now faces federal immigration charges that could put him
in a U.S. prison for up to 10 years.

Feliz-Esparza is one of thousands of illegal immigrants arrested in the
United States each year -- even though they have been arrested here before
and then deported.

These revolving-door deportation cases pose a serious challenge to law
enforcement agencies and cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. And
with the number of such cases apparently rising, federal officials are
beginning to change the way the cases are prosecuted.

Federal officials call them ``1326'' cases, referring to the criminal code
section the illegal immigrants are charged with violating.

It appears the lure is the fact that crossing back into California is so
easy -- and the criminal rewards are so lucrative.

``When you are talking about people from Mexico who are burglars or robbers
or drug dealers, there's a tremendous pull factor for those individuals to
keep coming back because it is simply more profitable for them to ply their
trade in the United States,'' said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Although the Justice Department does not keep separate statistics on the
prosecution of criminal deportees who return to the United States, spot
checks of federal judicial districts in California suggest the number of
1326 cases is getting larger.

In San Diego, for example, the U.S. Attorney's office prosecuted 1,606 of
the cases last year -- an increase of more than 20 percent in the past
three years. And federal border jurisdictions like Texas, Arizona and
Washington state are also handling a growing number of the cases.

In the rest of California, 1326 cases represent a smaller -- but still
significant -- portion of each U.S. attorney's criminal caseload. In Los
Angeles, for example, federal prosecutors filed 127 of the cases last year,
almost one out of every nine criminal cases the office prosecuted.

Mrozek said the Los Angeles office screens cases carefully and prosecutes
only the deportees with the longest and most serious criminal records.

Even in the Bay Area, nearly 600 miles from the Mexican border, prosecution
of previously deported criminals forms a major portion of the U.S.
attorney's caseload. Last year, the local U.S. Attorney's office processed
around 200 criminal returnee cases, according to Chief Assistant U.S.
Attorney Steven Shefler.

``We consider this a serious problem,'' Shefler said.

According to statistics released by the U.S. Justice Department in October,
federal immigration officials deported 50,165 aliens for involvement in
criminal activity during fiscal year 1997. Nearly twothirds of them had
been convicted of crimes considered aggravated felonies and 43 percent had
committed drug offenses.

On the surface, it would seem simpler and cheaper to deport these criminals
instead of prosecuting them as felons and sending them to U.S. prisons. But
federal officials said sending criminal deportees back to their native
country -- where they are free to return again -only encourages them to
keep violating the law.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kraemer, who oversees the San Diego federal
border crimes unit, noted that handing out minor jail sentences to criminal
returnees does not keep them from returning to the United States.

``We found that filing misdemeanors was worthless in terms of deterrent
value,'' Kraemer said.

He said his district replaced that approach with a fast-track program
designed to speed resolution of the 1326 cases. The get-tough method
requires defendants to waive indictment, a formal presentencing report, and
a variety of appellate rights (a typical requirement in plea bargain
arrangements). In exchange, the defendants agree in advance to a fixed
sentence that is less than the maximum that could be imposed.

Because so many time-consuming steps are eliminated, cases are generally
resolved in a matter of a few months.

``The stakes have gone up now. If you are deported and you come back and
are arrested again, you could do as much as . . . 10 years,'' Kraemer said.

The San Diego program has been very successful, Kraemer said, and is
credited by local law enforcement agencies with suppressing a great deal of
crime in San Diego.

``We've done around 4,700 of these cases this way now, and there are 4,700
people in prison who aren't out on the street committing new crimes,'' he
said. ``The word definitely gets around.''

Kraemer said San Diego established its program without increasing the size
of its prosecuting staff, requiring additional judges or spending more on
detention facilities.

In other California jurisdictions, however, 1326 prosecutions are processed
like any other criminal case: Each requires the filing of a criminal
complaint and a federal grand jury indictment. Each indictment requires
spending thousands of taxpayer dollars.

In addition, local, state and federal resources committed to tracking down,
prosecuting and incarcerating criminal deportees who have unlawfully
returned to the United States cannot be used to provide other law
enforcement services.

Nor do the court costs associated with these cases necessarily end after a
conviction. Except in San Diego, guilty verdicts or sentences are sometimes
appealed, adding additional legal fees to the taxpayers' bill.

For example, in 1997 Ignacio Gonzalez-Valencia appealed the seven-year
prison sentence he received for his 1326 case in Sacramento, even though
the maximum he could have received was 22 years.

Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the
sentence -- but only after a transcript of the original case had been
prepared and Gonzalez- Valencia's appeal had been heard by a three-judge
panel of the appellate court.

)1998 San Francisco Chronicle

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)