Prosecutions leading to deportation pick up in Nevada

For years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed a high value on locating immigration violators who have criminal records.

The 287(g) program, a local-federal partnership that allows some officers at the Clark County Detention Center to do a limited form of immigration policing, has enhanced ICE's ability to go after these so-called "criminal aliens."

Federal officials attribute the deportation of almost 1,900 illegal immigrants to the program, which was launched in November 2008.

But how have ICE and federal prosecutors in Nevada fared in identifying, removing and prosecuting illegal immigrants who haven't been nabbed at the local jail?

One way to measure success in those areas is to look at federal criminal prosecutions of immigration-related crimes.

In fiscal year 2009, the U.S. attorney's office in Nevada filed 206 such prosecutions, the vast majority for illegal re-entry into the country. That was up from 162 last year and only 67 two years ago, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse , a nonprofit group at Syracuse University that tracks federal law enforcement activities.

The prosecution numbers in Nevada last year fell short of levels reached earlier last decade, but partial data from this year suggests Nevada will see more immigration-related prosecutions and convictions than ever before.

Still, immigration prosecutions in Nevada and other nonborder states cannot compare to those in border states such as Arizona, where federal prosecutors last year filed more than 22,000 immigration-related cases. That was nearly 10 times as many as in 2002.

ICE officials say the recent uptick in prosecutions in Nevada is due in part to a team of agents that conduct daily roundups of criminal aliens and immigration fugitives, the agency's name for illegal immigrants who have ignored deportation orders.

"Our fugitive operations team is out on the streets aggressively pursuing these subjects," said Steve Branch, an ICE official who oversees immigration detention and removal in Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana.

That team made more than 2,000 arrests in Nevada and the other three states last year, according to ICE.

Only a fraction of those arrests resulted in federal criminal charges. Most were used to initiate removal proceedings.

Deportations of illegal immigrants are also on a record pace in this four-state region, where ICE says more than 4,000 immigration violators, 2,400 of them criminal aliens, were removed from the country in the first four months of this year.

Nevada, which has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants, is quite efficient in processing deportation cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

In states including California and Massachusetts, it takes an average of 20 months to resolve a case in federal immigration court. In Nevada, removal proceedings take an average of only about six months.

Contact reporter Alan Maimon at amaimon@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0404.