SANTA ANA, Calif. — Federal immigration officials vowed Friday to intensify efforts to track down illegal immigrants after scrapping a trial “self-deportation” program that attracted only eight volunteers.
Though the 21/2-week effort produced few volunteer deportees among illegal immigrants who are under court orders to leave the country, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said his agency will arrest more of them this year than last.
“We are going to continue our enforcement of immigration law whether it is convenient for people, or whether it’s not convenient,” said Jim Hayes, ICE’s acting director of detention and removal operations.
“Congress has mandated that we enforce these laws and that is what we intend to do,” he said.
Immigrant advocates accused ICE of using the failure of the “Scheduled Departure” program to justify raids that have caused many illegal immigrants to live in fear of a pre-dawn knock on the door.
“It seems to me ICE used this as nothing more than a publicity ploy as a means to justify their harsh enforcement of immigration law,” said Charles Kuck, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The self-deportation pilot program gave illegal immigrants up to 90 days to leave the country and was intended to quell criticism that its enforcement is heavy-handed and disruptive to families. Critics noted that those who participated were barred from returning to the United States for as long as a decade.
The program applied to only about 457,000 of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants nationwide. It was open only to those who have ignored judicial orders to leave the country but have no criminal record.
ICE has been steadily expanding the number of agents charged with finding fugitive illegal immigrants. Its fugitive operation teams made more than 30,000 arrests during the last fiscal year, nearly double those of the previous 12-month period.
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