Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/ Pubdate: Mon, 11 May 1998 Author: Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer DEPORTED CRIMINALS STREAM BACK INTO THE U.S. BY THE THOUSANDS Hector Feliz-Esparza, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, was deported on Jan. 8, 1997, following his conviction in Redwood City on drug and weapons charges. Five months later, Feliz-Esparza was arrested in the Bay Area again for drunk driving. He now faces federal immigration charges that could put him in a U.S. prison for up to 10 years. Feliz-Esparza is one of thousands of illegal immigrants arrested in the United States each year -- even though they have been arrested here before and then deported. These revolving-door deportation cases pose a serious challenge to law enforcement agencies and cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. And with the number of such cases apparently rising, federal officials are beginning to change the way the cases are prosecuted. Federal officials call them ``1326'' cases, referring to the criminal code section the illegal immigrants are charged with violating. It appears the lure is the fact that crossing back into California is so easy -- and the criminal rewards are so lucrative. ``When you are talking about people from Mexico who are burglars or robbers or drug dealers, there's a tremendous pull factor for those individuals to keep coming back because it is simply more profitable for them to ply their trade in the United States,'' said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Although the Justice Department does not keep separate statistics on the prosecution of criminal deportees who return to the United States, spot checks of federal judicial districts in California suggest the number of 1326 cases is getting larger. In San Diego, for example, the U.S. Attorney's office prosecuted 1,606 of the cases last year -- an increase of more than 20 percent in the past three years. And federal border jurisdictions like Texas, Arizona and Washington state are also handling a growing number of the cases. In the rest of California, 1326 cases represent a smaller -- but still significant -- portion of each U.S. attorney's criminal caseload. In Los Angeles, for example, federal prosecutors filed 127 of the cases last year, almost one out of every nine criminal cases the office prosecuted. Mrozek said the Los Angeles office screens cases carefully and prosecutes only the deportees with the longest and most serious criminal records. Even in the Bay Area, nearly 600 miles from the Mexican border, prosecution of previously deported criminals forms a major portion of the U.S. attorney's caseload. Last year, the local U.S. Attorney's office processed around 200 criminal returnee cases, according to Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Shefler. ``We consider this a serious problem,'' Shefler said. According to statistics released by the U.S. Justice Department in October, federal immigration officials deported 50,165 aliens for involvement in criminal activity during fiscal year 1997. Nearly twothirds of them had been convicted of crimes considered aggravated felonies and 43 percent had committed drug offenses. On the surface, it would seem simpler and cheaper to deport these criminals instead of prosecuting them as felons and sending them to U.S. prisons. But federal officials said sending criminal deportees back to their native country -- where they are free to return again -only encourages them to keep violating the law. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kraemer, who oversees the San Diego federal border crimes unit, noted that handing out minor jail sentences to criminal returnees does not keep them from returning to the United States. ``We found that filing misdemeanors was worthless in terms of deterrent value,'' Kraemer said. He said his district replaced that approach with a fast-track program designed to speed resolution of the 1326 cases. The get-tough method requires defendants to waive indictment, a formal presentencing report, and a variety of appellate rights (a typical requirement in plea bargain arrangements). In exchange, the defendants agree in advance to a fixed sentence that is less than the maximum that could be imposed. Because so many time-consuming steps are eliminated, cases are generally resolved in a matter of a few months. ``The stakes have gone up now. If you are deported and you come back and are arrested again, you could do as much as . . . 10 years,'' Kraemer said. The San Diego program has been very successful, Kraemer said, and is credited by local law enforcement agencies with suppressing a great deal of crime in San Diego. ``We've done around 4,700 of these cases this way now, and there are 4,700 people in prison who aren't out on the street committing new crimes,'' he said. ``The word definitely gets around.'' Kraemer said San Diego established its program without increasing the size of its prosecuting staff, requiring additional judges or spending more on detention facilities. In other California jurisdictions, however, 1326 prosecutions are processed like any other criminal case: Each requires the filing of a criminal complaint and a federal grand jury indictment. Each indictment requires spending thousands of taxpayer dollars. In addition, local, state and federal resources committed to tracking down, prosecuting and incarcerating criminal deportees who have unlawfully returned to the United States cannot be used to provide other law enforcement services. Nor do the court costs associated with these cases necessarily end after a conviction. Except in San Diego, guilty verdicts or sentences are sometimes appealed, adding additional legal fees to the taxpayers' bill. For example, in 1997 Ignacio Gonzalez-Valencia appealed the seven-year prison sentence he received for his 1326 case in Sacramento, even though the maximum he could have received was 22 years. Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the sentence -- but only after a transcript of the original case had been prepared and Gonzalez- Valencia's appeal had been heard by a three-judge panel of the appellate court. )1998 San Francisco Chronicle - --- Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)