More foreign nationals who go into hiding after being ordered deported are being found and expelled, new federal figures show.

BY ALFONSO CHARDY

Federal immigration authorities have become more adept at capturing foreign nationals who have gone underground after being ordered deported by immigration judges.

The number of so-called fugitive foreign nationals detained has more than doubled since a program to find them began in 2003, according to official statistics released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday.

Statistics also showed that the total number of foreign nationals deported in fiscal year 2004 reached 157,281 -- about 14,000 more than in 2003.

Release of the statistics cheered immigration officials, who have been criticized for not having an effective program to find foreign nationals who abscond after final deportation orders.

Efforts to find fugitive foreign nationals were stepped up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when scrutiny of foreign nationals deepened.

Under a program dubbed Endgame, teams of federal agents were deployed to hunt down more than 400,000 undocumented migrants listed as absconders. The migrants' names were also added to a federal criminal computer database that police officers routinely check.

They arrested 11,063 of the absconders in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Although that was an increase over the previous year, it was less than 3 percent of those on the list.

''Removing criminal aliens and other illegal aliens from the United States is critical to the integrity of our immigration system and important to the safety of our communities,'' said Michael J. Garcia, Homeland Security assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Endgame has been criticized by immigrants' rights advocates. They say because of faulty information, wrong addresses and misspelled names, some migrants were not aware that final deportation orders had been issued against them until federal agents arrested them.