San Bernardino County broadens inmate screening for deportation

Two flat-screen televisions loom large in a small booking office at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga.

Federally trained San Bernardino County sheriff’s employees use the screens to patch into other jails, some nearly 100 miles away, to identify inmates eligible for deportation.

For the past seven months, the Sheriff’s Department has used the $100,000 video-conferencing system to expand its collaborative program with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, established three years ago at West Valley.

Instead of only using eight ICE-trained sheriff’s custody specialists to interview potential criminal illegal immigrants booked into the Rancho Cucamonga jail, the video setup allows the same work to be done at jails in San Bernardino, Barstow, Joshua Tree and Victorville.

“We had the capabilities to go out there before, but we were losing time,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Sarkis Ohannessian, who oversees the 287(g) program, named for a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows local agencies to enforce immigration laws under federal supervision.

“The entire interview is conducted from the screen,” Ohannessian said.

Since the program launched in January, remote video-conferencing has accounted for about 20 percent of the inmates identified as eligible for deportation after their cases are resolved, officials said.

In all, 4,117 inmates have met the requirements and had federal immigration holds placed on them in the last year.

San Bernardino County has run its screening program since January 2006, followed soon after by Riverside County. Officials with both counties said at the time that a significant number of illegal immigrants were “slipping through the cracks” and remaining in the country even after felony convictions that made them eligible for deportation.

It costs about $12 million per year to jail illegal immigrants in San Bernardino County and about $5 million in Riverside County, officials said at the time. Federal funding reimburses only a fraction of those amounts.

“It’s been very successful,” Riverside County sheriff’s Lt. Joe McNamara said of the program that has identified nearly 1,600 inmates eligible for deportation since the start of 2008.

The programs triggered concern by immigration activists, who worried that an inmate could erroneously be subjected to a federal hold after a minor arrest, then find himself powerless to fight the tide sweeping him out of the country.

Officials with both counties said their screening employees attended ICE-training sessions that taught them questions to ask of inmates flagged during booking.

If an inmate indicates that he or she was born out of the country or records show a previous deportation, the interviewers will press further and use available records to determine the person’s official immigration status.

Those subject to deportation are handed over to federal authorities only after their criminal cases are completed, whether it’s a felony that requires state prison time or a misdemeanor that brings probation.

“I’ve told people over and over again, ‘We don’t deport anybody,’ ” said Karina Cornejo, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s custody specialist who conducts some of the inmate interviews. “We are only the first line in a long process.”

With the video-conferencing system, Cornejo is no longer limited to interviews at her West Valley office.

Riverside County has its ICE-trained deputies screen inmates only at Robert Presley Detention Center.

McNamara said Riverside County does not need an expanded system because investigators with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security visit the more-remote jails to screen inmates.

Cornejo said she believes her work has led to fewer repeat offenders finding their way back into jails, at taxpayer expense.

“People that have committed crimes in the past were usually able to bond out before being noticed, because they knew the system,” she said. “Now we can catch them.”

Reach Paul LaRocco at 951-368-9468 or plarocco@PE.com

Inmate Screening

County jail officials say a nearly 3-year-old program that identifies criminal illegal immigrants booked into jails is seeing results.

San Bernardino County: 4,117 inmates referred to federal authorities for possible deportation in last 12 months.

Riverside County: 1,147 inmates referred in 2008; 417 in the first four months of 2009.