At the top of the list were 6,000 absconders from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries, officials announced.
But by early 2003, authorities had resolved only 38 percent of those cases, either by detaining the immigrants or by confirming that they had left the country or gotten legal status, according to the 9/11 Commission. In a report on terrorist travel, the commission concluded: "It is very difficult to find alien absconders without extraordinary effort or pure luck."
Deportation officer Jamie Colomb, left, goes over information with supervisory officer Raymond Smith before a predawn raid in Hyattsville.
(Photos Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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The reasons for the difficulty were clear as Smith's team glided through the slumbering neighborhoods of Hyattsville. The officers had three targets in addition to Kabert. They had tried to pinpoint the immigrants by scouring real estate and other records. But the absconders left few paper trails.
At 6:20 a.m., the fugitive squad pulled up in front of a tiny house on 31st Place with a birthday balloon bobbing from the mailbox. The target: a British immigrant ordered deported a decade ago. Like up to 20 percent of the absconders, he had a criminal record, for marijuana distribution and child abuse, officials said. But the couple who answered the door said the man had moved three months earlier.
The team moved on to its next target, a Nigerian believed to be living in an apartment tower called the Seville. Minutes after the agents disappeared into the elevator, Smith's radio crackled. "There's no occupant. They just moved in September."
Smith chewed his gum and looked into the darkness. "Couple days late. This is the frustrating part."
Then it was on to 17th Avenue and a brick rambler trimmed with white icicle lights. The officers were seeking a Guatemalan man. They found a Salvadoran family.
"Green cards galore," said an agent, emerging from the home.
Smith sighed. "Boy, this makes for a long day." The Guatemalan had moved years ago.
The search for the absconders wasn't supposed to be this difficult. When the program was announced in December 2001, officials said they would put the absconders' names into FBI's National Crime Information Center database. That would allow local and state police to identify whether people they stopped for routine infractions were on the list.
But after three years, only 38,521 names are in the database -- about 10 percent of the absconders -- said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. "It's a workload issue," he explained.
Dozens of federal lawmakers have backed measures to enlist local and state police in the effort to detain illegal immigrants, including absconders. But the idea has been fiercely opposed by immigrant advocates and some politicians, who believe it would shatter the trust between police and immigrant communities, making it harder to solve crimes. Some also worry it could foster ethnic profiling.
For all their frustrations, the fugitive teams have made progress. In the first seven months of fiscal 2004, they apprehended 7,239 absconders, twice as many as in the same period a year earlier, according to ICE statistics. The agency is drawing up plans for 30 more teams, probably including one focused on both the District and Northern Virginia. But budget problems have bedeviled ICE, and Knocke said it wasn't clear if all 30 teams would be fielded by the end of 2005.
Even with the new teams, it will be hard to track down all the absconders. But the squads at least are starting to change a culture of impunity, officials say. As recently as the 1980s, many immigrants showed up for deportation processing, former officials said. But then a surge of illegal immigration overwhelmed the ability of agents to keep up.
