Washington – At 2:10 a.m., a fleet of dark SUVs surged from the garage beneath a federal building onto the deserted streets of Fairfax County, Va., carrying a raiding party of flak-jacketed immigration agents.
Their quarry: illegal immigrants who have ignored and evaded deportation orders. Called “fugitive aliens” or “alien absconders,” they have nearly doubled in number since 2001, now totaling more than 636,000.
The Fairfax operation was part of a stepped- up national effort that has increased the number of fugitive arrests from 1,560 in 2003 to a projected 16,000 this year, officials said.
As Congress ponders a sweeping overhaul of immigration laws, the hard mathematics of eliminating the backlog of cases has become central to the debate.
The failure to remove “low-hanging fruit” such as fugitives “may reflect the fact that there’s a complete neglect for enforcement, or that even in egregious cases, they just can’t get their act together,” said Steven Camarota, spokesman for the Center on Immigration Studies, a group that advocates less immigration.
Immigrant advocates and some former federal authorities counter that the growing backlog of fugitives – who make up 5 percent of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants – demonstrates the futility of relying on enforcement alone to stop illegal immigration.
“The absconder population is exhibit No. 1,” said Victor Cerda, former chief of staff and general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We haven’t been able to handle the 600,000-plus who went through the legal system. What’s going to lead us to believe we’re going to handle the 12 million?”
John Torres, ICE’s director of detention and removal operations, said the agency has made major improvements in recent months.
“Within a year, we’ll see a big drop. … We’re attacking on all fronts,” Torres said, stopping short of a promise to eliminate the backlog.
