Immigration Control

Proposals to tighten the nation's borders and to speed the expulsion of deportable aliens must deal with complex and sensitive issues, such as constitutional protections, international relations, humanitarian concerns, and difficult budgetary tradeoffs. Almost half a million illegal aliens apprehended by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) between 1988 and 1990 were detained for a variety of reasons, including criminal activity. Yet according to information on average length of detention per alien, INS has only enough room for about 99,000 aliens a year at its current facilities. INS has been releasing criminal aliens and has declined to pursue illegal aliens because it has no room in which to hold them. INS' planned addition of more than 2,000 beds by 1996 will not significantly alleviate current space shortages. Detaining all such aliens in current facilities is impractical and too costly. On the other hand, detaining only some aliens may mean that aliens in similar circumstances are treated differently. Although INS has made agood faith effort to implement its national priority system for determining which aliens to detain, GAO found that INS does not treat excludable aliens consistently--some were released within a few days while others remained in detention for long periods of time. In GAO's view, INS' inadequate detention space is symptomatic of a larger problem: The need for the government to come to a consensus on whether and how best to control the U.S. border and remove illegal aliens. Until these issues are more fully resolved, GAO believes that it is unreasonable to expect INS to overcome its space problems.

GAO found that: (1) about 489,000 aliens were subject to detention between 1988 and 1990, and INS expansion of detention space will not alleviate the shortage of detention space; (2) limited detention space, laws, and alien nationality affect INS detention priorities, although selective detention could lead to unequal treatment; (3) INS institutional hearing and preflight inspection programs can mitigate some of the demand for detention space; (4) the 1990 average detention period per alien was 23 days, giving INS a 99,000-aliens-per-year capacity; (5) INS has released criminal aliens or failed to pursue illegal aliens due to lack of detention space; (6) INS has successfully attempted to implement a national priority system to determine which aliens most require detention; and (7) policy reexamination and greater funds are needed to control the number of aliens being detained.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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