Va. Jails to Report Foreign Inmates

"We just want to know how the system works," he said. "We're spending resources to provide this information [to ICE], and we need to know what the results are."

Through various enforcement programs, ICE says it identified 164,296 illegal immigrants who served time in local jails in fiscal 2007, including 2,738 in the District, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.

ICE officials said recently that they had no data on how many were deported, how many were released from custody and given summonses to appear before immigration judges and, of those, how many failed to show for hearings and simply disappeared.

ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said gathering those statistics will require "manual tabulation" that will take "some time."

Recognizing the unpopularity of 287(g), the agency is preparing to roll out what it calls a "sweeping new plan," dubbed Secure Communities, that will give all local agencies direct access to a database that contains information collected by ICE and the Department of Justice.

However, the multibillion-dollar program has not been fully funded by Congress, and even if it is, ICE still might not have enough money to detain all of the illegal immigrants it identifies, Pendergraph said.

"You know something? We're playing catch-up," he said. "Five years ago, immigration enforcement for state and local law enforcement [agencies] wasn't even on the radar scope. We didn't get in this mess overnight. And we're not going to get out of it overnight."