By SUSAN CARROLL, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
The state has been unable to enforce a new law designed to increase the deportations of illegal immigrants from the Texas prison system amid concerns that federal immigration officials are unprepared to handle the anticipated influx of convicted criminals, state officials said.
Under the new law, which was scheduled to take effect Sept. 1, state prisoners who are granted parole and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials must either be deported or leave the country voluntarily - or risk being returned to state custody to serve out the remainder of their sentences.
The law was crafted to address a vexing problem identified by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reported granting parole to some illegal immigrants and turning them over to ICE - only to later learn that they were not removed from the country, said state Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano.
Madden, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, said the law also aims to save taxpayers millions of dollars by paroling primarily "low-risk, nonviolent" prisoners who are in the country illegally after they become eligible for parole.
ICE officials indicated this week that they need to hire a "few" more agents to process the expected increase in deportable prisoners coming out of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but they have not indicated how many, Madden said.
He added that the state does not yet have a timeline for implementing the law.
"Before we implement it, we need to make sure ICE will be able to handle the load we would possibly be sending them," Madden said.
'Treading water'
ICE spokesman Gregory Palmore said the agency will work with the state and provide additional manpower and bed space if needed.
He said ICE has already absorbed a sharp uptick in the number of prisoners released from TDCJ custody - up about 28 percent since Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year, compared with the same time period last year.
But ICE union officials in Texas warned that their operation in Huntsville, which processes state prisoners for deportation, is "treading water."
"If the state of Texas doubles or triples their releases on a given day, there is no way we will be able to keep up," said Tre Rebstock, president of the local ICE union.
Federal officials estimate that roughly 11,500 of TDCJ's 156,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants. Madden said roughly 6,000 of them are eligible for parole.
Each month, TDCJ releases to ICE about 400 suspected illegal immigrants who have served their full sentences or have been granted parole - or roughly 5,000 annually, according to ICE data.
Shortage of judges
ICE has identified and filed paperwork to detain more than 10,000 suspected illegal immigrants currently incarcerated in Texas.
But state officials said many of the illegal immigrants identified by ICE still have pending immigration cases when they are up for parole, which often means they are entitled to appear before an immigration judge before they can be removed from the U.S.
ICE union officials said part of the problem lies in a shortage of immigration judges assigned to hear cases in Huntsville. The immigration court system is run by a separate agency, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which declined comment on Thursday.
Rissie Owens, chair of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, said that unless ICE has finished its removal proceedings, board members can't be sure that "those they vote to release are actually deported and not released into our communities where they may be a threat to pubic safety."
ICE data shows that roughly one in five of the 5,000 illegal immigrants discharged annually lacks a final removal order clearing the way for deportation.
Some offenders held
ICE is required by federal law to detain suspected illegal immigrants with convictions for many serious crimes - such as murder and sexual assault - until they are removed from the country, with certain limited exceptions.
In the past, the agency has released some suspected illegal immigrants with criminal records, primarily for nonviolent crimes, under orders of supervision while they await hearings in Houston's immigration court, which now has backlogs stretching into 2013.
Under the new state law, ICE can no longer release detainees with criminal convictions, and instead must either remove them from the country, house them in its own federal detention system or return them to the custody of TDCJ.
Months of meetings
The parole board has been meeting with ICE officials for months to work out how to enforce the new law.
"We wanted to make sure people turned over to ICE were going to be deported," Madden said. "We are trying to make sure the public is safe, and at the same time try to save us some hard-earned resources and some money that the state would not have to be spending."
Some victims advocates said the state needs to be careful in how the law is enacted, questioning whether it is fair to consider shaving off time for foreign-born inmates who have been convicted of serious crimes.
"If you are going to take murderers that are sentenced to long periods of time and just deport them rather than have them serve their sentences, I don't really think that's fair," said William "Rusty" Hubbarth, an attorney with the Houston-based organization Justice for All, a crime victims group. "They should be made to serve their sentences."
susan.carroll@chron.com
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