By Brian Bennett
McClatchy-Tribune
WASHINGTON — In January, Evin Adonis Ortiz was arrested and charged with killing a 24-year-old man in Los Angeles. After running Ortiz’s fingerprints through an FBI database, police learned he was in the country illegally - and this wasn’t his first arrest.
Ortiz had convictions for driving without a license and attempted grand larceny.
A congressional study released Tuesday found dozens of examples of illegal immigrants who were released and later arrested in connection with felonies, including murder.
The report, by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, studied the cases of 46,734 illegal immigrants. It concluded that those who had been arrested and released were later arrested in connection with 19 murders, three attempted murders and 142 sex crimes, among other infractions.
“President (Barack) Obama’s reckless amnesty agenda is dangerous and deadly for Americans,” Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement released Tuesday.
About 16 percent of illegal immigrants who were arrested were rearrested within three years, according to the study, which was based on data the Judiciary Committee had subpoenaed from the Obama administration.
That recidivism rate, however, is significantly lower than that of the general prison population. About 43 percent of prisoners released in 2004 nationwide were returned to prison within three years, according to a study by the Pew Center on the States, a nonprofit research institute. In California’s state system, about 65 percent of released prisoners are back behind bars within three years.
The illegal immigrant rearrest rate is “pretty modest ... proportionally as compared with what happens in the criminal justice system in general,” said Doris Meissner, a former head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service who is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials noted that none of the people accused of murder in the report has been convicted. Ortiz has pleaded not guilty.
The Obama administration, arguing that it is making the best use of a limited budget, has put convicted criminals and serial immigration violators at the front of the line for deportation.
The number of people deported from the U.S. has increased slightly every year since Obama took office.
But some Republicans argue that all arrested illegal immigrants should be deported.
Copyright 2012 Spokane Spokesman-Review