Specter: Deportation difficult

WILKES-BARRE – A disruptive inmate in the restrictive housing unit at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility didn’t deter U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter from visiting the facility on Monday.

Specter, R-Philadelphia, and federal officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignored the inmate who was shouting words in Spanish through a sealed cell door.

The senator spent about an hour with Luzerne County commissioners Maryanne Petrilla, Greg Skrepenak and Stephen Urban, Warden Gene Fischi, Deputy Warden Sam Hyder and Prison Board President Wister Yuhas to discuss problems with deporting convicted illegal immigrants.

Pennsylvania prisons incarcerate an estimated 2,132 criminal aliens, 1,000 of whom may be undocumented aliens, Specter’s office said in a news release. There are 20 undocumented immigrants at the county facility.

LCCF Capt. Mark Rockovich said an estimated 180 illegal immigrants were jailed at the county facility in 2007, adding to the overcrowding problem.

“We may not have an overcrowding problem if we didn’t have illegal aliens,” Rockovich said.

A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated thousands of convicted illegal immigrants are released because of the unwillingness of some countries to issue travel documents necessary for repatriation. As a result of these barriers, ICE must provide funds to incarcerate convicted illegal immigrants whose countries are either slow or unwilling to accept their citizens.

Major hurdles law enforcement agencies face include an inability to identify undocumented immigrants, lack of resources to deport them and an inadequate process to compel their native countries to accept them, Specter said.

“Immigration (and Customs Enforcement) takes them but they can only hold them for 180 days,” Specter said.

Specter said the recidivism rate – the tendency to commit a criminal act again – of convicted illegal immigrants is extremely high, adding to overcrowding in prisons and jails. He said Egypt has refused to accept one of its citizens who is jailed at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill.

Pledging to address the problem, Specter suggested legislation on refusing visas to foreign countries who won’t accept their citizens.

“We need to put pressure on those countries to take them back,” Specter said.