The officials said that 55 percent of the immigrants deported were criminal convicts, including 51,620 people convicted of felonies like homicide, drug trafficking and sexual offenses.
Gov. George Ryan signed legislation that lets the state collect and store DNA samples from every criminal convicted of a felony.
More than 90 percent of the foreigners deported last year, Ms. Napolitano said, were criminal convicts, fugitives or recent border crossers, the administration's priority groups for deportation.
His grandfather Friedrich Flick was a Nazi war criminal, convicted at Nuremberg of, among other things, employing slave labor in the manufacture of munitions.
It instructs agents to focus on the worst offenders, including criminal convicts, gang members and foreigners who came back after being expelled.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Mr. Morton said those numbers would not decrease, but they wanted agents and courts to focus on deporting the worst offenders, including national security risks, criminal convicts and those who repeatedly violate immigration laws.
Under a policy started in June 2011, administration officials have sought to focus their enforcement efforts on deporting criminal convicts, while steering away from illegal immigrants arrested in minor offenses like traffic violations.
However, it is far from the longest sentence ever meted out to a criminal convicted of an especially heinous crime.
For example, only criminals convicted of felonies are currently excluded from buying handguns.
He said he accepted the decision of past governments to accept guilty verdicts on Japanese war criminals convicted in a postwar tribunal.
remove criminals convicted of serious crimes, but based on the statistics from I.C.E., that's not what was happening," said Brie Callahan, the governor's spokeswoman.
