PROGRAM SENDS ILLEGALS HOME\INS officials stress re-entry penalty to criminal offenders.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Less than two days after he was released from a Los Angeles County jail after serving time for drug possession, Daniel Oviedo-Diaz was on an Immigration and Naturalization Service bus, headed for his home country of Mexico.

Oviedo-Diaz acknowledged that he would like to turn around and go back. But he said he probably won't - fearing that if he is caught, he could be sent to prison for up to 15 years.

Under federal immigration law, deported criminal illegal aliens who return to the United State without authorization can be prosecuted and sentenced to up to 15 years in prison for illegal re-entry.

"I really don't know (what I'm going to do), because I want to come back, but if I come back, it's going to be worse for me this time," Oviedo-Diaz said after a short deportation hearing following his release from jail on drug charge.

Deporting more criminal aliens and stressing the law on illegal re-entry are at the heart of an 8-month-old model program in Los Angeles County jails, INS and law enforcement officials say.

Under the program, INS agents are stationed at least 18 hours a day, six days a week at the county jail, searching through the files of prisoners about to be released.

Foreign-born prisoners are interviewed, and their identities, fingerprints and records checked with INS and state crime computer records.

Those who are deported have special notations added to their crime information computer files, telling local law enforcement agencies the INS will take custody of those prisoners within 24 hours of arrest if they are found again in the United States, said INS District Director Richard Rogers.

"It's very efficient for us," Rogers said. "These kind of (big-city) jails are a significant resource for us to easily identify criminal aliens within the system."

Nearly 4,600 illegal aliens were taken from Los Angeles County jails' release lines and deported between June and December. The INS had temporarily shifted nearly 60 agents into the program from other duties in the region.

Since the initial one-month test with 24-hour-a-day staffing, the program has been scaled back slightly and now has about 40 agents assigned in what has become a regular part of the district's budget, said INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner and other Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C., credited the Los Angeles County jail program as a major factor in the record number of criminal illegal aliens deported nationwide last year.

Overall, the service sent 51,600 criminal illegal aliens back to their home countries last year, a 15 percent increase from 1994 and a 75 percent jump from 1990, when only about 29,500 were deported or returned to their home country, Meissner said.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

A program placing federal agents at jails is credited with turning away 51,600 aliens in 1995. David Crane/Daily News