Summary

The Institutional Hearing Program (IHP) is the Justice Department's main vehicle for placing aliens who are incarcerated in federal and state prisons into deportation proceedings so that they can be expeditiously deported upon release from prison. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has not fully complied with the law's requirements concerning criminal aliens who have committed aggravated felonies, nor has it realized the full potential of the IHP. INS did not identify many deportable criminal aliens before their release from prison. For the second half of fiscal year 1995, this resulted in nearly 2,000 criminal aliens, including some aggravated felons, being released into U.S. communities without an INS determination of the risk they posed to public safety. GAO asked INS to determine whether 635 of these aliens had committed crimes following their release. INS found that 23 percent had been rearrested for crimes, including 183 felonies.

GAO noted that: (1) the IHP is the Department of Justice's main vehicle for placing aliens who are incarcerated in federal and state prisons into deportation proceedings so that they can be expeditiously deported upon release from prison; (2) in fiscal years (FY) 1995 and 1996, Congress authorized dedicated IHP staff to help expand and enhance the program; (3) the INS has not fully complied with the law's requirements concerning criminal aliens who committed aggravated felonies, nor has it realized the full potential of the IHP; (4) INS did not identify many deportable criminal aliens before their release from prison; (5) for the second half of FY 1995, this resulted in nearly 2,000 criminal aliens, including some aggravated felons, being released into U.S. communities without an INS determination of the risk they posed to public safety; (6) GAO asked INS to determine whether there had been post-release criminal activity by 635 of these criminal aliens; (7) INS determined that 23 percent had been rearrested for crimes, including 184 felonies; (8) INS did not complete the IHP for the majority of criminal aliens who were identified as potentially deportable and were released from federal and five state prisons during the last 6 months of FY 1995; (9) INS was able to more quickly remove from the country those aliens for whom it completed the IHP with final deportation orders than those aliens for whom it completed deportation hearings after their prison release; (10) if INS had completed proceedings for all aliens released from state and federal prisons in FY 1995 before their release, it could have avoided nearly $63 million in detention costs; (11) INS' efforts to improve the IHP have encountered several impediments; (12) the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and some states have accepted INS' proposals to make the processing of aliens more efficient, but others have not; (13) INS did not staff the IHP at the expected levels because of hiring delays, agent attrition, and the use of lower graded agents to replace rather than supplement higher graded agents already working on IHP cases; and (14) INS' top managers did not adequately respond to identified IHP performance problems.