U.S. announces Texas roundup of 300 immigrants with criminal records
04:21 PM CST on Friday, February 26, 2010
By DIANNE SOLIS / The Dallas Morning News
dsolis@dallasnews.com
Nearly 300 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions were arrested this week in Texas, federal immigration officials and prosecutors said today.
The largest number of arrests, 119, were in North Texas.
Of the total, about half of the immigrants had convictions for violent crimes or drug offenses. Most of the crimes were committed in the Untied States, authorities said.
"These are not people we want walking on our streets," said John Morton, the assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security who oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The arrests, though, raises questions about why the immigrants hadn’t been deported earlier, immediately after they'd served their time for criminal convictions.
Morton said scrutiny of inmates in federal and state prisons is good, and immigrants are generally removed from the country after serving their prison sentences. But there are large gaps in municipal and county jails.
A new program, called Secure Communities, seeks to link jail staff with federal data banks to ensure that those with criminal convictions are removed from the country. There are only 110 jail locations in the country that now use the program.
By the end of 2013, ICE would like coverage across the nation, Morton said.
Secure Communities has come under scrutiny for the relatively low number of persons caught who have been convicted of violent crimes – or what’s known in ICE as a "level one" offense.
Carrollton, Farmers Branch, Irving, Mesquite and Dallas and Denton counties are among the jurisdictions using Secure Communities processes. The program began in November 2008.
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