SAN FRANCISCO — The case of a Vietnamese ex-con accused of brutally slaying five people in a San Francisco home has shed harsh light on U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have allowed the release of thousands of criminal immigrants into U.S. communities because their own countries refused to take them back.
After Binh Thai Luc, 35, spent years behind bars in San Quentin for an armed robbery, an immigration judge ordered him deported six years ago. Instead, he resumed his old life in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood because his native Vietnam never provided the travel documents required for his return.
Two Supreme Court rulings have established that illegal immigrants who have committed a broad range of criminal offenses can’t be locked up indefinitely while they await deportation and should be released after 180 days unless they are likely to be deported soon.
If the government decides they pose a terrorist threat or deem they are especially dangerous, such as sex offenders, some provisions allow for them to be held for a longer period.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement put a new immigration hold on Luc this week. Officials said the agency was following the law when it released him after the Vietnamese government ignored a request for his travel documents.
The country is one of the slowest to respond to the U.S. government’s paperwork requests.
Now, as the investigation continues into the gruesome San Francisco homicides earlier this month, the political debate over the legal standards that allow criminal immigrants to remain on U.S. soil if their own countries refuse them is flaring.
“It is a tragedy that five Americans lost their lives because a dangerous criminal immigrant could not be deported to his home country,” said U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is sponsoring a bill that would challenge the high court’s rulings by expanding the pool of immigrants who could be detained for more than six months, perhaps indefinitely, if they can’t be repatriated.
Gary Mead, ICE’s executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations, testified before Congress in May that he anticipated more than 4,000 immigrant former felons would be released into the community in fiscal year 2011 because their native countries did not cooperate.
“Every alien’s removal requires not only cooperation within the U.S. government but also the cooperation of another country,” Mead testified then.
Vietnam is one of about 20 countries that is slow to cooperate, if it does at all, according to ICE. While Cambodia is least cooperative, the agency said Vietnam was the second-slowest country, taking an average of 218 days to respond to paperwork requests.
International relations also come into play. Citizens of Cuba, which doesn’t have diplomatic relations with the U.S., represent about 40 percent of all the criminal immigrants released after serving time, the ICE statistics show. About one of every eight was Vietnamese.
8,740
The number of immigrants who were ordered to leave the U.S. after serving time in prison from 2009 through the spring of 2011 but were let go by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials because their native countries wouldn’t take them back by the time they had to be released from an immigration jail
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Change would ease process for relatives of citizens• WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are family members of U.S. citizens to apply for legal permanent residency.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment an administrative change intended to reduce the time illegal immigrants would have to spend away from their families while applying for legal status, officials said.
The current system requires the applicant to first leave the U.S. to seek a legal visa, but under the proposed change, illegal immigrants could claim the time apart from a spouse, child or parent would create “extreme hardship” and allow them to remain in the U.S. as they begin the process.
Currently, families often are separated for several months as they await resolution of their applications. The change could reduce that time apart to one week in some cases, officials said. The White House hopes the new procedures could be in place by the end of the year.
Tribune Co. Washington Bureau
