Illegal visitors in Catch-22: Detained at airport, then sent back Illegal visitors find themselves in a Catch-22

On the way out of U.S., they're being detained, then deported to their original flight destination

It seems counterintuitive.

The government pulls people suspected of being here illegally out of airplane lines and then pays to detain, prosecute and deport them to the country they were headed to in the first place.

Public defenders say it's a colossal waste of time and taxpayer money.

"What's silly about this is that they are on their way home. They have gotten the message that they shouldn't be here," said Houston's Federal Public Defender Marjorie Meyers. "It's not cost-effective."

Not true, says Houston's U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle.

The people they are prosecuting are repeat violators of U.S. immigration laws and it's not only necessary, but also efficient, to stop them and prosecute them, he said.

"We had already expended some time, effort and money before to institute deportation," DeGabrielle said.

To allow them to come back into the country without proper permission and then just let them leave would minimize what the government is trying to accomplish, he said.

"We feel it's definitely worth the resources to hold these people accountable," DeGabrielle said.

Question of a trend

It's not the number of people who've been detained and prosecuted that has public defenders most concerned. The numbers have been relatively small.

But a trend could be developing: five cases since July, four in the past three months.

All five had been deported previously, had no criminal convictions and were stopped and detained by Customs and Border Protection officials at Bush Intercontinental Airport while trying to board planes to leave the country.

The four men and one woman were heading south — to Mexico, Honduras or El Salvador. All were accused of the felony of re-entering the United States illegally after their prior deportation. A felony record will make it difficult for them to ever get legal permission to come back to this country.

DeGabrielle said there is no new policy, and the cluster of people stopped while leaving the country, at least four of them just flying through Houston making a connection, is a coincidence.

His office is not convinced they were leaving the country for good, he said, since all have come back without permission before.

Costs add up

Generally, the suspects are detained first at the airport, then brought downtown into custody of the U.S. Marshals Service . They then plead guilty to having entered the country illegally and are sentenced to time served, then deported at government expense, the lawyers involved said.

The biggest cost to taxpayers is the detention, which a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said averages $66.96 a day nationwide. They are held for two to three months, so that cost would be roughly $4,000 to $6,000.

Added to that is the cost of deportation — a bus trip to the border for Mexico, a plane ride for other countries. And then there is a portion of the salaries of the government lawyers and the court personnel involved, plus court costs.

In the earliest case noticed by the public defenders in Houston in July, Freddy Navarro-Doblado was accompanied by a California police officer who had planned to take him all the way to Honduras.

Instead, Navarro-Doblado was taken into custody in Houston.

The other four cases were in December and January.

"It's a Catch-22 for these people. They can't leave the country to make it right," said Michael Herman, an assistant federal public defender who's handling some of the cases. "They are self-deporting, but they wind up in shackles and chains when these people have ... heeded the cry of the public for them to leave."

One defendant was sentenced this month by U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas.

On his way home

Hector Manuel Palafox-Acevedo , 29, pleaded guilty to the felony of entering the United States without proper documentation and was sentenced to the two months he has already served in detention. He will now be deported to Mexico, where he was heading when he was stopped as he tried to board a plane Dec. 12.

Herman defended Palafox-Acevedo in court and said he was heading to his hometown on a one-way ticket to Mexico to get married to his fiancee, a U.S. citizen, and work to get proper papers to come back to the United States legally.

He said Palafox-Acevedo has been here since he was 14, working as a machine operator and migrant worker and recently helping his fiancee raise her children.

Palafox-Acevedo, a slight man wearing detention center khakis, cried as he told the judge on Feb. 11 he would not come back to the United States again.

"The only thing I want is to go back," Palafox-Acevedo told the judge tearfully through a court interpreter. "I am afraid of going back to jail."

But as prosecutor Bert Isaacs noted, Palafox-Acevedo has been deported without a felony conviction three times: in 2002, 2006 and 2007. Isaacs asked the judge to hold Palafox-Acevedo longer while a full background check was done.

"I don't know whether Mr. Palafox-Acevedo has gotten the message or not," Isaacs told the judge, when asking for the maximum penalty of six months in prison, given all the sentencing factors in the case.

But the judge said it would not be a good use of resources to do a further background check since Palafox-Acevedo had already been vetted.

Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C., said the agency checks passenger lists to find people who have broken the law, which has helped stop a child abduction and find large amounts of currency and drugs.

"We have an obligation and the authority to intercept them," Klundt said.

She said she hasn't been asked about these kinds of detentions and prosecutions anywhere but Houston, and that it is the prosecutors' decision whether to see the cases through.

mary.flood@chron.com