In a cooperative effort with Canadian and Nigerian authorities, the INS deported 89 illegal aliens to Nigeria, including several war criminals. Sixty-eight had been illegally present in the United States and many of those had committed crimes including possession of narcotics, trafficking, assault and battery, fraud, robbery, burglary and rape. The other 21 deportees were illegally present in Canada and had serious criminal convictions including war crimes in Nigeria. Upon arrival in Lagos, the individuals were taken into the custody of the Nigerian government.

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A study mandated by the PATRIOT Act and the Enhanced Border Security Act concluded that the biometric system used to protect the nation's borders should be a dual approach employing both fingerprints and facial recognition technology. The technologies will become the federal standard for identity documents to be issued to foreigners starting next year. Scientists at the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made the recommendation in a report recently delivered to Congress. NIST's evaluations studied two applications: positively identifying visa applicants and verifying that the holder of a visa is the person to whom it was issued.

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New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton announced this week that she would support a national identification card for US citizens if other measures to keep illegals out of the country failed. Clinton said she would support it as part of an overall effort to improve national security.

"Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country," Clinton warned. "And one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry and exit system so that if we're going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let's have a system that keeps track of them."

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Early this week a U.S. Border Patrol agent was knocked unconscious while following a group of people whe believed were illegal entrants, when he came upon a second group of suspected illegal entrants, according to a FBI spokeswoman. When the agent encountered the second group, several of them attacked him at once and hit him on the head, back and neck with a large rock. The agent lost consciousness and lay on the ground about 40 minutes until he was found by another agent. He was released the next morning. No suspects are in custody.

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Gabriela Rodriguez, a Costa Rican who serves as U.N. special expert on the rights of migrants, said independent human rights workers should be allowed access to Mexican illegal immigrants detained in the United States, in an 18-page report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Rodriguez said detained migrants have no access to free legal assistance and many fail to complain about abuses because they know they will be kept in detention as witnesses. Rodriguez also said many are subject to xenophobia and exploitation on both sides of the border.

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Hospitals near the Mexican border are blaming the money woes on undocumented immigrants. The complaints have triggered a study that concluded that emergency medical care provided to illegal immigrants resulted in nearly $190 million worth of unpaid hospital bills in year 2000. Under federal law, hospitals must treat anyone who seeks emergency medical care, regardless of their income or immigration status. Because ER officials aren't allowed to ask about a patients's immigration status, they don't know what percentage of unpaid bills can be attributed to undocumented Mexicans. The study used statistics on the number of patients admitted for emergency care without providing Social Security numbers.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl obtained federal funding for the study and plans to introduce a measure next week to help reimburse states and health providers for the cost of treating undocumented immigrants. The bill calls for $500 million in federal money to go to states and is similar to one he wrote last year that was not passed.