"The state has struggled for years to reduce the soaring population in its overburdened prisons, but a proposal that could have forced as many as 20,000 inmates who are illegal immigrants to serve their sentences in their home countries has faltered over concerns it would be viewed as anti-immigrant. The idea of having undocumented immigrants convicted of felonies in California serve their sentences in their home countries has been debated over the years, but it generally stalled based on two objections: concern that the prisoners would be treated differently at home, because they would probably serve shorter sentences; and concern that the inmates might be denied due process in being transferred."

May 4, 2006 - James Sterngold 

"Why should Butler County taxpayers have to pay for jail costs associated with people we don't believe should ever have been in this country, let alone this state or county, to begin with?.. It's time the federal government should at least pay for the criminals they let stay here... If they don't want to pay for them, then they can deport them..."

Jan. 31, 2006 - Richard K. Jones, MS 

"The [Los Angeles] county is right to send the illegal immigrants in its jails to deportation hearings after their sentences... Deporting them won't solve overcrowding in the short term because they have to serve their sentences before being turned over to the feds, but it will probably reduce crime and the jail population over the long term... There should be a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but convicts have forfeited the right to be on it. Send them home."

Feb. 6, 2007 - Los Angeles Times 

"Some of these illegal aliens are also habitual criminals... they impose a harsh fiscal cost on local taxpayers who must foot the bill for new jails and increased law enforcement. Local government law enforcement officials... are faced with a massive and continual onslaught of criminal illegal aliens, they can easily become overwhelmed... You have a right to expect that when a criminal is arrested, the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] will help determine quickly if he or she is an illegal alien. If a criminal is an illegal alien, the INS should detain and deport that person immediately."

July 27, 1998 - Lamar Smith, JD 

"Immigrants also have been deported for relatively minor and non-violent crimes, raising the question of whether deportation is a proportionate penalty to impose on top of the criminal sentences they have already served.

When Congress set out to change immigration laws in 1996, it wanted to ensure that the worst non-citizen offenders were deported from the United States... But the changes were so overbroad as to impose permanent exile from the United States for non-violent, misdemeanor crimes—even in cases where the court determined that the crime was so minor that it did not warrant a prison sentence...

...it is time for Congress to amend these laws, restore proportionality to the law, and eliminate their unintended consequences... to ensure that immigrants are not deported for minor (especially non-violent) offenses or for offenses that were not grounds for deportation at the time they were committed."

July 18, 2007 - Human Rights Watch (HRW) 

"The laws [deporting criminal immigrants] are not only cruel in their rigidity, they are senseless... Most members of the European Union and other major democracies take family relationships and other links to the country of immigration into account before a final deportation decision is made... But immigration judges' hands are tied in the US; there is nothing they can do to protect families..."

July 18, 2007 - Alison Parker, JD