DANIEL GONZÁLEZ
The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX - It's just after dawn, and five immigration agents in street clothes are gathered in the parking lot of a Big Lots store in Mesa ready to go after their "target," a 41-year-old woman they are fairly certain is living in a house nearby.

Operations such as this are happening frequently in Phoenix and across the country as part of an aggressive new strategy by the Bush administration to deport illegal immigrants who were ordered out of the country but never left.

After final instructions, the agents pull on jackets with POLICE printed on the back and pile into three unmarked cars. Minutes later, two agents are knocking on the door of a ranch-style house on Garnet Avenue while the others cover the rear yard.

The agents knock louder until finally a young man in a T-shirt comes to the door. The woman is not there, he says.

Then a teenage girl holding a kitten tells the agents the woman they are looking for is her mother. She is inside sleeping.

A moment later, the woman steps outside, squinting in the early sunlight. She is wearing pajamas and flip-flops. Her mouth drops open as the agents handcuff her.

As the agents escort the woman away, the girl with the kitten starts crying, and yells out, "Bye, Mom."

The woman, an illegal immigrant with a criminal record for drug possession, is being deported.

One by one, agents for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are hunting down the estimated 400,000 fugitive immigrants in the United States, including 3,818 in Arizona.

Critics say the new effort is costly to taxpayers and tears apart families.

They say the strategy targets immigrants with otherwise acceptable backgrounds.

Many first came to the attention of immigration officials after they applied for asylum or legal residency but were denied.

"What may look like an attractive policy on the surface to people concerned about illegal immigration usually turns out to be a policy that has quite a human cost of separating families and pulling people out of communities where they have been contributing members," said the Rev. Phil Willis-Conger, executive director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.

The group provides legal assistance to immigrants in detention.

The $50 million government crackdown was begun in 2003, sparked by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Since then, about 80 new agents assigned to 18 special "fugitive operations teams" have been sent to 16 cities.

Immigration officials say their top priority is removing the estimated 80,000 illegal immigrants ordered deported after they were convicted of crimes.

The agency plans to add agents to staff up to 30 more fugitive operations teams in the next two years.

That's enough to place one team in all 23 fields offices and at least two teams in the largest offices such as Los Angeles and New York, said Mark Lenox, an ICE detention and removal official in Washington, D.C.

Phoenix is expected to get its own seven-member team soon, probably sometime after April.

"Their sole responsibility is to investigate, apprehend and remove aliens who have failed to comply with court orders to leave the United States," said Phillip Crawford, Phoenix director of detention and removal operations for ICE.

In the meantime, agents have been pursuing fugitive immigrants in addition to their other duties.

Since Oct. 1, 2003, Phoenix agents have arrested 247 fugitive immigrants. Nationwide, the number is 13,458.

The fugitives are from dozens of countries.

Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates stronger immigration controls, said going after fugitive immigrants, especially criminals, represents "a good place to start."

"It's a great idea, but a very small part of a very big problem," he said. "If there are 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States, what does 400,000 represent of that? Very small."

Crawford, the Phoenix detention and removal director, declined to say how agents located the woman they arrested on Garnet Avenue. He declined to give her name, citing privacy issues.

Reached by telephone at her home, the woman's 22-year-old daughter, Perla Vasquez, said she had no idea immigration agents were looking for her mother.

She said her mother has lived in the United States since she was a child.

She said her mother has five U.S.-born children, the youngest a 16-year-old daughter.

The woman was convicted of felony drug possession charges involving cocaine and heroin in California in 1988, Crawford said.

In 1990, an immigration judge ordered her deported. Her appeal was dismissed the next year. In 2003, a fugitive operations team in Los Angeles tried to find her. By then she had moved to Phoenix.