MIAMI - Immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and are being held indefinitely while awaiting deportation have the right to petition a judge for release, a federal appeals court ruled.
About 18,000 criminal aliens targeted for deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been jailed for years since 1996, when Congress eliminated a requirement that the INS release anyone who could not be deported within six months.
Some deportation delays are due to the refusal of the immigrants' native countries to accept them. Other cases have been blamed on bureaucracy.
Federal judges in Florida had been rejecting petitions seeking review of INS detentions since the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled last year that federal judges do not have the power to intervene before deportation hearings are completed.
But on Sept. 29, the 11th Circuit ruled that those petitions must be considered by federal judges in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
''That's pretty significant because otherwise these people would have no recourse at all in the courts, which would be pretty shocking,'' attorney Joan Friedland of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami said Monday. ''It's a big problem.''
Maria Elena Garcia, an INS spokeswoman, referred a call for comment to the INS' executive office of immigration review in Virginia, but the office was closed Monday for the federal holiday.
The ruling involves Ivan Boz, a native of the Bahamas. After serving a four-month sentence for car theft, he was detained by the INS in 1997 and has been held ever since as a deportable alien.
Boz did not challenge his deportation order, just the limbo he has been in for years. He asked to be released.
The federal judge who rejected Boz's appeal must now reconsider it.