Nearly 3,000 Illegal Immigrant Sex Offenders Released Under Court Order

Some 2,837 illegal immigrants convicted of sexual offenses were recently cut loose from American jails to comply with a Supreme Court order that says immigrants cannot be held if their home countries refuse to take them back, according to The Washington Times.

That was just a small percentage of the nearly 59,347 released from jail as of September of last year due to the court order. Since they could not be deported, they were released under some form of supervision, the Times reported.

The release information came from a Government Accountability Office report issued last week that also showed five percent of the sexual offenders released were not registered in local communities.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that immigration detention cannot be punitive, so if illegal immigrants can't be deported they must be released back into American communities.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said immigration officials are not rigorous about monitoring sexual offenders released from jail.

"I’m surprised that only five percent of them are not properly registered," Vaughan said.

The GAO report also suggested the court order made it more difficult to keep track of sexual offenders. "The risk that alien sex offenders will reside in U.S. communities without being registered is increased," the GAO said.

The report also revealed that large numbers of convicted sex offenders that were deported simply turned around and came back to the United States, where they committed other offenses.