Illegal Immigrants: What Happens When Countries Refuse Deported Citizens?

When another nation refuses to accept illegal immigrants the United States tries to deport back to that country, those people have a right to stay in the U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in the case of Zadvydas v. Davis that the United States could not hold foreign criminals indefinitely after they finished their sentences here and awaited deportation because doing that would violate the Constitution, reported The New American. The High Court allowed for the federal government to hold such nationals for six months after their incarceration ended, requiring it to then release them – no matter what they’d done – if their country of citizenship refused to allow them to return, according to Fox News.

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“Long after they were ordered out of the country, thousands of criminal aliens from places like China, Cuba, Vietnam and Pakistan remain free in the United States to commit new crimes because their home countries refuse to take them back,” Fox News reported in August 2012.

It told of three “particularly heinous” crimes — all involving murder — committed by men who stayed in the United States after they were ordered deported and their home countries refused them. More than 50,000 criminal illegal aliens who had been ordered deported remained in the U.S., Fox News reported. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, had sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives targeted at discouraging other countries from refusing deportations by arranging for the U.S. to refuse visas to nations that refused to take back illegal immigrants the U.S. tried to send home.

According to congressional records, Poe in 2011 introduced the “Deport Convicted Foreign Criminals Act of 2011,” which sought to direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to provide Congress four times a year a list of each country that had refused or unreasonably delayed the deportation of an illegal immigrant back to that nation. The measure would have refused student, tourist or business visas to any listed country that refused to take back criminals the U.S. tried to deport. Fox News reported, “That bill went nowhere, opposed by the travel industry, the administration and Democrats in Congress.”

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