Washingtontimes.com
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually because of its inability to identify and deport illegal immigrants being held in federal, state and local prisons, a Justice Department audit said yesterday.
The audit, by the department's Office of the Inspector General, said the INS "has not effectively managed" the Institutional Removal Program (IRP), which was created in 1988 as an effort to deport criminal aliens as soon as they served their prison terms.
The agency has not even determined the nationwide population of foreign-born inmates, the audit said.
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said the INS is not able to identify and process deportable inmates and that several illegal immigrants improperly released have gone on to commit additional crimes. He said INS interviews of foreign-born inmates to determine their deportability were "minimal to nonexistent," particularly at the county level.
"We found that many potentially deportable foreign-born inmates passed through county jails virtually undetected," he said.
Chronic vacancies involving INS immigration agents have hampered agency efforts to identify criminal inmates, the audit said, noting that INS employees assigned to the removal program are often reassigned at the district management's discretion to any one of several competing priorities, such as employer sanctions, anti-smuggling and fraud.
Posted by Suzanne at October 8, 2002