Immigrant database failed to detect suspect before rape of young girl

Washington Post ^ | January 26, 2011 | Tom Jackman

[moonshinner_09]

Salvador Portillo-Saravia, a member of the MS-13 street gang, was charged with raping an 8-year-old girl at her Fairfax County home last month. But he never should have been in Fairfax in the first place.

Federal officials deported Portillo-Saravia, of Sterling, to El Salvador in 2003, and he sneaked back in illegally. Now, officials are wondering why a much-touted federal program didn't catch him before the rape.

Four weeks before the crime, Portillo-Saravia was in the Loudoun County jail for public intoxication. That's when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program, called Secure Communities, should have identified him as an illegal immigrant and he should have been taken into custody.

Loudoun authorities ran Portillo-Saravia's fingerprints through a federal database, but despite the 2003 deportation, nothing was found. He was released after 12 hours behind bars.

Portillo-Saravia, 29, is now the subject of a manhunt by local police and federal marshals.

Officials involved with Secure Communities and immigration experts said the incident points to confusion about how the program should work and to gaps in the immigration database. Many people who were deported before 2005, including Portillo-Saravia, are not in the fingerprint database, ICE officials said.

Jail officials in Virginia and Maryland who have relied on the program said they were not aware of the gap in the database.

"I was under the impression that everybody they had contact with was in the system," Henrico County Sheriff Michael L. Wade said.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[La Lydia]

What is even more maddening about this is that DOJ paid HUNDREDS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to EDS (then owned by General Motors) to set up an identification database for the Border Patrol back in the early 1990s. It never worked. The individual BP posts could not communicate with each other, or the main office, let alone the FBI. There have been two or three very expensive tries in the meantime. There is no excuse for not having been fingerprinting deportees and keeping those prints in an accessible database since the 1990s.