The Clipboard: 500,000 deportees from U.S. wreaking havoc

From an article¹:

In Jamaica, one out of every 106 males older than 15 is a criminal deportee from the United States. About 10,000 strong, most live in the capital, Kingston. Jamaican police say they have been involved in hundreds of murders.

In Guyana, more than 600 criminal deportees have been absorbed by a country of less than 700,000. Before their arrival, drive-by shootings, carjackings, kidnappings and bank robberies were uncommon, said Ronald Gajraj, the country's Home Affairs minister. Now such crimes are a constant part of Guyanese life.

In Honduras, Interpol figures show murders increased from 1,615 in 1995, to 9,241 in 1998, after the first wave of what is now 7,000 criminal deportees. Honduran police say the guns, drugs and gangs they brought with them are largely responsible. (link)

Out of sight, out of mind and who cares the devastation it wreaks.

Via Magpie

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Complete text of the article, 500,000 deportees from U.S. wreaking havoc, by Randall Richard

The U.S. government calls them criminal aliens, but they are as American as drive-by shootings and crack cocaine.

Many came to the United States as children, often in the arms of men and women fleeing poverty and war. They went to school here, but usually not for long. They came of age on city streets from Los Angeles to New York. Eventually they broke the law.

In 1996, Congress banished them from America for life and directed immigration agents to hunt them down. The biggest dragnet in U.S. history is well under way. More than 500,000 have been rounded up and deported, according to government figures, and this year they are being banished at a rate of one every seven minutes to more than 160 countries around the world.

The culture of drugs and guns many carry back to their native lands is wreaking havoc in nations that receive them in substantial numbers.

Overwhelming crime

A six-month Associated Press investigation, which included interviews with more than 300 police, deportees, church leaders, social scientists and government officials in the United States and abroad, found that in some countries, the crime waves are overwhelming police.

In Jamaica, one out of every 106 males older than 15 is a criminal deportee from the United States. About 10,000 strong, most live in the capital, Kingston. Jamaican police say they have been involved in hundreds of murders.

In Guyana, more than 600 criminal deportees have been absorbed by a country of less than 700,000. Before their arrival, drive-by shootings, carjackings, kidnappings and bank robberies were uncommon, said Ronald Gajraj, the country's Home Affairs minister. Now such crimes are a constant part of Guyanese life.

In Honduras, Interpol figures show murders increased from 1,615 in 1995, to 9,241 in 1998, after the first wave of what is now 7,000 criminal deportees. Honduran police say the guns, drugs and gangs they brought with them are largely responsible.

Under the 1996 U.S. law, every non-citizen sentenced to a year or more in prison is subject to deportation, even if the sentence is suspended. Deportable crimes can be anything from murder to petty theft. The law is retroactive, and it eliminated nearly all grounds for appeal.

As many as 250,000 aliens serving time in U.S. prisons, on probation or parole have been marked for deportation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of deportable criminal aliens among the estimated 11.8 million non-citizens living in the United States is unknown.

Eighty percent of the deportees are being sent to seven Caribbean and Latin American countries - Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic - where jobs are scarce and police resources limited. Mexico has absorbed 340,000, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.

Few prospects available

Deported after serving sentences for their crimes in America, the criminal deportees are simply set loose upon arrival, usually with little or no money and with no prospects for work.

In El Salvador, for example, criminal deportees are greeted at the airport by Roman Catholic charities workers, given a sandwich and bus fare, and sent on their way. In the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic, officials said many have been dropped at the airport by U.S. immigration escorts without even bus fare to get to town.

To survive in what for most of them are unfamiliar surroundings, many turn to crime.

The criminal deportees who most worry receiving countries are the gang members.

In Honduras and El Salvador, for example, Los Angeles street gangs with names like Mara Dieciocho (the 18th Street Gang) and Mara Salvatrucha (the 13th Street Gang) are competing for the drug trade, warring with indigenous thugs and with one another.

"We're sending back sophisticated criminals to unsophisticated, unindustrialized societies," said Al Valdez, an Orange County, Calif., assistant district attorney and gang expert. "They overwhelm local authorities." For example, he said, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one detective is working 139 gang homicides.

In El Salvador and Honduras, many deportees become victims before they can become victimizers. Regarded as pariahs in their native lands, they are hunted by vigilante squads.

In San Pedro Sula, vigilantes with rifles prowl the night, searching for young men with American gang tattoos, said the city's Roman Catholic bishop, Romulo Emiliani. "They approach young people, open their shirts, and if they have tattoos, they don't ask anything. They just kill them."

Hugo Omar Barahona, who was 4 when he immigrated to Los Angeles with his parents and 21 when he was deported to El Salvador for robbery in 1999, was shot in the leg and back on April 28. The two gunmen, he said, apparently spotted his American gang tattoos.

The 1996 law was intended to reduce crime in the United States by getting rid of some of the people who commit it. Large-scale deportations are a relatively new crime-prevention strategy. There were criminal deportations in the past, but the number last year alone exceeded the total between 1905 and 1986.

One in every 11 U.S. residents - 32.5 million people - was born abroad. According to a report by a group that included the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the crime rate among immigrants is only half to a third that of native-born U.S. citizens. But unlike citizens, aliens who commit crimes can simply be sent home.

Not really home

Officials in many of the receiving countries, however, said "home" is not where the criminal aliens are going, that many, perhaps most, were children when they first came to America and have no real connections to the countries of their birth.

The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has no statistics to support or refute this, and most receiving countries don't either.

Guyana's foreign minister, Rudy Insanally, said many Guyanese who immigrate to America with their children are well educated, yet their children return as criminals. "You are sending us the dregs of your society," he said, "and at the same time you are poaching our teachers and nurses."

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, a primary author of the 1996 law, responded that until they obtain citizenship, immigrants are guests in the United States. "When they commit a serious crime, they have, under our laws, forfeited the right to live among us."

The only problem with the law, he said, is that too many eventually make their way back through America's porous borders.

Vietnam and Laos refuse to accept criminal deportees.

In Mexico, criminal deportees tend to remain in border towns where U.S. immigration agents drop them off. There, they await their chance to slip back into the United States. In the meantime, Mexican police say, some traffic in drugs and commit other crimes.

reference=http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1026exports26.html