Tracking Down Immigrant Fugitives
Md. Squad Part Of Get-Tough Effort
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page A01
Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/4agsn
Caption:
Deportation officer Jamie Colomb, left, goes over information with
supervisory officer Raymond Smith before a predawn raid in Hyattsville.
(Photos Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
The rendezvous was in front of Shoe City. In the frosty darkness, four
Homeland Security officers strapped bulletproof vests over their sweat
shirts and fingered their pistols. It was 5 a.m., and the voice of their
supervisor, Raymond Smith, sliced through the silence in the parking lot of
Prince George's Plaza.
"Take a look at this," said Smith, a beefy D.C. native with a shaved head.
He passed around a folder on their first target, a 25-year-old West African.
The immigrant had been ordered deported in 2003 but never left the United
States. Now, he was living in a Hyattsville apartment -- or so Smith hoped.
"We've got a 50-50 chance of getting him," he said.
Smith is part of an effort to track down 370,000 "absconders" -- illegal
immigrants who have disobeyed orders to leave the country. As part of a
get-tough approach after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Homeland Security
Department has deployed 18 fugitive squads to catch these immigrants,
including a team in Maryland.
A morning with Smith's team shows how difficult it is to find absconders,
part of a rising tide of illegal immigration. The fugitive squads capture 35
people a day across the country, on average. But each day, another 70
immigrants are ordered deported and fail to comply, officials say. So the
absconder population grows ever larger.
"We're still in the midst of the battle in terms of control," acknowledged
Victor Cerda, a top official at the department's Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.
The immigrant sought by Smith's team was typical of the problem. Etienne
Kabert, a short, small-boned man from Ivory Coast, had applied for political
asylum, officials said. He was turned down, and an immigration appeals court
sent him a letter in July 2003 ordering him to leave the country.
He never did.
Like Kabert, most immigrants aren't jailed while their cases are heard.
About one-third vanish before their cases are decided, Cerda said. Of the
remainder, about 85 percent of those who get deportation notices don't show
up for final processing, he said.
For years, the absconders knew that immigration agents were too busy to turn
up at their doors.
That is changing, as was evident as Smith's team cruised down Queens Chapel
Road on a recent Tuesday. Under a moonlit sky, Smith watched his officers
file into the Hamilton Manor Apartments. A light snapped on in an upstairs
window. But it was Kabert's roommate. The man they sought was working an
overnight shift, the officers relayed to their supervisor.
Smith gazed impassively at the building.
"We'll be back," he declared.
The absconder program began as the immigration system was facing a volley of
criticism after the Sept. 11 attacks. What better place to start fixing the
system, officials reasoned, than the absconders? Unlike most of the
country's 8 million or more illegal immigrants, the absconders were known to
the government -- because they'd been detained briefly on immigration
charges or had applied for legal status. And they'd had their day in court.
At the top of the list were 6,000 absconders from Muslim and Middle Eastern
countries, officials announced.
But by early 2003, authorities had resolved only 38 percent of those cases,
either by detaining the immigrants or by confirming that they had left the
country or gotten legal status, according to the 9/11 Commission. In a
report on terrorist travel, the commission concluded: "It is very difficult
to find alien absconders without extraordinary effort or pure luck."
The reasons for the difficulty were clear as Smith's team glided through the
slumbering neighborhoods of Hyattsville. The officers had three targets in
addition to Kabert. They had tried to pinpoint the immigrants by scouring
real estate and other records. But the absconders left few paper trails.
At 6:20 a.m., the fugitive squad pulled up in front of a tiny house on 31st
Place with a birthday balloon bobbing from the mailbox. The target: a
British immigrant ordered deported a decade ago. Like up to 20 percent of
the absconders, he had a criminal record, for marijuana distribution and
child abuse, officials said. But the couple who answered the door said the
man had moved three months earlier.
The team moved on to its next target, a Nigerian believed to be living in an
apartment tower called the Seville. Minutes after the agents disappeared
into the elevator, Smith's radio crackled. "There's no occupant. They just
moved in September."
Smith chewed his gum and looked into the darkness. "Couple days late. This
is the frustrating part."
Then it was on to 17th Avenue and a brick rambler trimmed with white icicle
lights. The officers were seeking a Guatemalan man. They found a Salvadoran
family.
"Green cards galore," said an agent, emerging from the home.
Smith sighed. "Boy, this makes for a long day." The Guatemalan had moved
years ago.
The search for the absconders wasn't supposed to be this difficult. When the
program was announced in December 2001, officials said they would put the
absconders' names into FBI's National Crime Information Center database.
That would allow local and state police to identify whether people they
stopped for routine infractions were on the list.
But after three years, only 38,521 names are in the database -- about 10
percent of the absconders -- said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. "It's a workload issue," he explained.
Dozens of federal lawmakers have backed measures to enlist local and state
police in the effort to detain illegal immigrants, including absconders. But
the idea has been fiercely opposed by immigrant advocates and some
politicians, who believe it would shatter the trust between police and
immigrant communities, making it harder to solve crimes. Some also worry it
could foster ethnic profiling.
For all their frustrations, the fugitive teams have made progress. In the
first seven months of fiscal 2004, they apprehended 7,239 absconders, twice
as many as in the same period a year earlier, according to ICE statistics.
The agency is drawing up plans for 30 more teams, probably including one
focused on both the District and Northern Virginia. But budget problems have
bedeviled ICE, and Knocke said it wasn't clear if all 30 teams would be
fielded by the end of 2005.
Even with the new teams, it will be hard to track down all the absconders.
But the squads at least are starting to change a culture of impunity,
officials say. As recently as the 1980s, many immigrants showed up for
deportation processing, former officials said. But then a surge of illegal
immigration overwhelmed the ability of agents to keep up.
"People feel they can get away with running . . . because the immigration
law isn't enforced anywhere else," said Mark Krikorian, executive director
of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks more limits on newcomers.
The solution goes beyond adding fugitive teams, officials say. Cerda, an
intense young Mexican American lawyer who heads the detention program at
ICE, said the government has to keep people from becoming absconders in the
first place.
Cerda is overseeing several pilot programs to better track immigrants
through their court proceedings. Some immigrants are required to wear
electronic ankle bracelets; others must call in periodically. Locking up
everyone facing immigration charges isn't feasible because of a lack of
detention beds, he said, but another solution must be found. "The honor
system has failed," he said.
By 7:50 a.m., Smith's team had returned to Kabert's apartment building. As
the agents went inside, Smith absentmindedly rapped his knuckles on the
steering wheel of his Ford Expedition. Traffic whooshed by. Smith stared
silently out the window. A radio deejay's voice filled the Expedition.
"Angela, you just won $1,000!" "Ooooh!" exclaimed Angela.
Twenty minutes passed.
Suddenly, Smith's gaze focused on a slender man with a cocoa complexion
alighting from a bus. The man spotted the agents emerging from the apartment
building and abruptly started walking around it. But one of the officers was
waiting.
"We got him!" yelled the officer.
It was Etienne Kabert. He meekly led the officers to his apartment, where he
had ID cards with various names and birth dates, as well as a French
passport he had acquired years ago.
Smith had gotten his man. One down, 8,500 absconders to go in Maryland.
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