Illegals, Go Home! Twice As Many Deported Since 2004
Deportees Gerardo Lopez Arellano, 24, (left) and Luis Armando Jimenez-Gonzalez, 20, eat breakfast at ICE’s Illinois facility. Both have criminal records and came for jobs.
Number of deportees on rise nationwide
CHICAGO | Just after dawn, Gerardo Lopez Arellano shuffles along in a line of 51 other shackled men on an isolated tarmac where a white, unmarked federal jet is waiting to take them to the U.S.-Mexico border.
The 24-year-old construction worker, who grew up near the Texas border, was deported twice before this year, but he is indifferent on this cool morning at O’Hare International Airport.
“I’ll probably be back,” he says.
Arellano is one of nearly 11,200 illegal immigrants deported this year through Chicago, the location of a field office for the Midwest region covered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By contrast, in 2004 about 6,600 people were deported from the region, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.
Deportations also have increased nationwide, with nearly 350,000 immigrants sent home through September, compared with about 174,000 in the comparable period in 2004.
The trend is expected to continue, but experts and immigration officials aren’t certain whether deportations - which affect less than 3 percent of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States this year - are an effective means of controlling that population.
ICE’s count also does not specify how many people, like Arellano, have been deported repeatedly.
The majority of those deported in the six-state Midwest area are from Mexico. More than half, about 6,800, have not been accused of crimes.
Not so Arellano, who at age 12 joined the street gang La Raza (the Race), a term used to describe his fellow countrymen. He has a criminal record, one he says is mostly the result of drunken fights. He was charged with battery in 2006 and convicted of armed robbery last year, factors that likely will keep him from gaining U.S. citizenship.
Arellano was born while his mother visited Mexico, but he has several siblings who are U.S. citizens. His father died in 1993.
(AP)
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