Revolving door at border

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SAN DIEGO -- Handcuffed and shackled with their pockets pulled inside out, more than 150 illegal aliens are loaded onto an airplane every night, bound for detention centers in the United States to await deportation orders to their home countries.

Searched by a cadre of uniformed federal agents and encircled by heavily armed officers, they are herded off buses in the dead of night on an isolated tarmac at San Diego International Airport, where they silently shuffle single file on board a waiting MD-82 jetliner.

Some never have been on an airplane. Others have made the trip before. Many will be back.

A monthlong investigation by The Washington Times found that a shortage of detention space and lack of manpower force federal authorities to regularly release illegal aliens back on the streets of America -- and often to ignore requests to pick up illegals in the custody of state and local officials.

"There's no question we need more detention space, more people and more equipment to get the job done," said J. Michael Vaughn, a detention and deportation supervisor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles. His processing center handles between 3,000 and 4,500 illegals a month.

"If we are the final step in an immigration-enforcement system that seeks to remove from the country those people who do not legally belong, we need some help. I assure you: The battle is being fought right here," Mr. Vaughn said.

ICE, hamstrung by long-standing budgetary constraints that have left its detention and removal program seriously undermanned and underfunded, has 20,000 beds available at ICE-managed and -contracted detention centers nationwide -- not enough to house the aliens in custody on a daily basis.

And that shortfall comes at a time when ICE, led by the agency's 18 fugitive operations squads, is vigorously hunting 80,000 criminal aliens and more than 320,000 "absconders," foreign nationals who were ordered deported but disappeared. Meantime, the Border Patrol is expected to arrest a million illegal aliens this year.

As for the estimated 8 million to 12 million illegals living and working in the United States, no one is really trying to find them. Even if anyone was, there is no place to put them.

Hundreds of Mexican nationals, arrested everyday by federal authorities as they try to illegally enter the United States and by state and local police during routine crime investigations, are released back onto American or to the Mexican side of border towns because of the detention-space shortage.