The AP has an article about the attempts to catch "the nearly half-million immigrants who have ducked deportation orders or are targets for removal because they were convicted of a crime."

The article is by Elliot Spagat and Laura Wides: "Drive to deport illegal fugitives 'a losing battle'" [1]:

Even as the government pours millions into enforcement, each year the number of new fugitives far exceeds the number of immigrants removed...

Federal agents will have detained nearly 10,000 fugitives during the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. It's impossible to know how many of those deported have already returned to the United States. During the same period, an estimated 40,000 new fugitives were added - so the list has actually grown longer.

The explanation is straightforward. Homeland Security has only about 19,500 detention beds nationwide. Although local jails hold some of the overflow, overwhelmed immigration courts often release immigrants who are challenging their deportation and trust they'll show up for court...

[...new ways to track people using ankle bracelets, etc...]

Co-author Laura Wides was featured in the older post Does "AP" stand for "AgitProp?" - Part 2 of a long series. While this article isn't that bad, note the following:

1. The article has 31 paragraphs.

2. Two of those are devoted to "[[Doris Meissner,]] former President Clinton's top immigration official", starting at paragraph 23. (See Meissner's Gift to Criminal Aliens [2] and Thwarting Homeland Security [3])

3. A National Lawyer's Guild (!) spokesman gets 1.5 paragraphs starting at the second sentence in paragraph 27. (Apparently the CPUSA spokesman wasn't available)

4. Only the first sentence in paragraph 27 is devoted to the obvious problem:

Some critics say the government relies too much on enforcement instead of addressing the fundamental reasons immigrants come.

Well, duh. You don't have to deport people if they aren't allowed to come here in the first place.

Perhaps in a future article Laura Wides might want to ask why Bush spends so much money on enforcement at the same time as he's encouraging as many illegal aliens as possible to come here.

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[1] ocregister · com/ocr/2004/09/19/sections/news/focus/article_246225.php
[2] humaneventsonline · com/article.php?id=323
[3] humaneventsonline · com/article.php?id=238