The federal Immigrations & Customs Enforcement Agency, under scrutiny since its failure to deport Jean Jacques led to the stabbing death two years ago of Casey Chadwick in Norwich, has agreed to make personnel and policy changes.

John Roth, inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, last month issued a follow-up to an earlier report on ICE's untimely deportation and failed supervision of so-called criminal aliens, or non-U.S. citizens convicted of violent felonies. The report contains five recommendations, all of which ICE has indicated it would implement. 

Members of Connecticut's congressional delegation, including U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, had asked for the Inspector General's investigation following Chadwick's death.

"The Inspector General follow-up report issued last month reveals serious structural problems at ICE in its handling of serious violent deportees for which there is universal support for deportation," Courtney said in an email. "These serious shortcomings included poor management of its workforce, substandard training of agents regarding their execution of deportation orders, and a dysfunctional relationship with the State Department - a key partner in implementing deportation cases. Homeland Security needs to use its authority to address these serious flaws and Congress should enact HR 1499 as a way to reinforce a credible system of deportation for the most serious cases involving violent offenders under ICE jurisdiction.

The first four recommendations involve inter-agency procedures. The Inspector General found that deportation policies and guidelines have not been formally updated in more than a decade and changes made since then have been communicated informally, "which can lead to confusing and sometimes conflicting understandings of policies by different officers at different field offices."

Roth also found that staffing of deportation officers around the country is not systematic, or based on caseloads, and does not deal with the difference in work needed to remove a person in detention versus someone who is living in the community. He found also that there has been no clear training curriculum for deportation officers, who were once known as immigration enforcement officers.

ICE agreed to new procedures based on Roth's recommendations and report back by mid-May. 

The inspector general's fifth finding calls for better collaboration with the State Department on tough cases, such as the one involving Jacques, the Haitian national who murdered Chadwick in her Norwich apartment on June 15, 2015. The report indicates that a 2011 memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security and State Department exists but is not sufficient to show the two agency's are working through their coordination issues.

"I feel it's all feel-good stuff that's not going to address the serious problems," said New London attorney Chester W. Fairlie of the findings.

Fairlie has been working with Chadwick's mother, Wendy Hartling of Gales Ferry, to call attention to the government failures that led to Chadwick's death

Fairlie said nothing has changed since April 2016, when Hartling told the story of her daughter's death at a House oversight hearing on criminal aliens released by the Department of Homeland Security and implored lawmakers to fix the problem.

He has sought compensation for Chadwick's family under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but ICE has refused to pay. He suspects a federal lawsuit would be unsuccessful, because when others attempted to sue ICE, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has held up the agency's claims of sovereign immunity.

Fairlie said the agency has known all along that it was impossible to supervise and follow up on the deportation orders of immigrants such as Jacques, who had final deportation orders but had not been deported and were released from detention after the government ran up against legal time constraints. 

Jacques had been convicted of attempted murder in 1996 and served 16 years in prison. Released on parole in 2012, he was detained by ICE, who attempted to deport him three times. Haiti refused to take him, claiming Jacques did not have the required identification documents. He was detained a total of 205 days and released back into the community.

In the Norwich area, where Jacques was living, each deportation officer had 10,000 cases. Detention facilities, with a capacity of about 45,000 people nationwide, are nearly always full, Fairlie said, and if ICE was to carry out President Trump's orders to step up enforcement, they would need four or five times that many bunks for detainees.  

The Inspector General's report acknowledges the difficult task of the immigration enforcement agency.

"ICE is almost certainly not deporting all the aliens who could be deported and will likely not be able to keep up with growing numbers of deportable aliens," the report says.

As of August 2016, ICE was supervising about 2.2 million aliens in the community, including 368,574 who are convicted criminals, according to the report. In FY 2015, ICE removed or returned 235,413 individuals to their native countries, including 139,368  convicted criminals, according to the report.

The Connecticut delegation has also introduced legislation, referred to locally as "Casey's Law" to improve ICE's ability to deport non-citizens who commit violent crimes.

Currently pending is the Remedies for Refusal of Repatriation Act (HR 1499), co-sponsored by Courtney and Republican U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall. The bill would require ICE to prioritize cases that involve violent crimes and to "move them up the food chain" to the U.S. Department of State if a country refuses to accept, or repatriate, a citizen who has been deported from the United States.

The State Department has authority to take an array of actions, all the way up to denying aid to countries or denying visas to its citizens. Courtney has said he is hopeful the measure involving "recalcitrant repatriation" will receive bipartisan support.

If the bill passes, the two agencies would be required, by law, to develop a process for regularly assessing what countries are recalcitrant, and the State Department would be required to get involved with difficult removal cases involving serious criminals.

k.florin@theday.com