PHILADELPHIA -- Oscar Martinez Martinez, a 31-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras, became a fugitive in March when he failed to show up for deportation.

So you would think federal authorities would be pleased to see him.

You would be wrong.

Pat Salerno, an agent for a bail bond company, received a chilly reception when he showed up with Martinez at the downtown Philadelphia immigration office.

Despite increased attention to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant "absconders" who have vanished after receiving final deportation orders, surrendering them can be a bureaucratic obstacle course.

Salerno, ordered to leave the fugitive outside the building with an assistant, took an elevator to a fifth-floor waiting room.

"I'm a fugitive recovery agent," Salerno told a receptionist standing behind a thick glass window. "I have a defendant I picked up in Atlantic City." Salerno asked whether he could hand over Martinez, which would get the bond company off the hook for $5,000 in bail forfeiture.

Because the deportation order had come from a judge in Houston, Salerno asked that the case file be transferred to Philadelphia.

The clerk disappeared briefly to confer with a supervisor and returned with a terse answer. "He has to be taken to Houston," she said.

The exchange could have taken place almost anywhere in the country.

In Miami, two recovery agents -- bounty hunters paid by bond companies -- reported they had given immigration agents a list of 30 fugitives they planned to deliver, but were told to wait two weeks because there was not enough detention space.

Other offices, like Philadelphia's, rigidly follow long-standing rules requiring the bond company to deliver the illegal to the office that ordered his removal, and then only after giving 72-hour advance notice.

Asked about the reluctance to accept fugitives, Tony Tangeman, director of detention and removal in the Department of Homeland Security, said Thursday that such responses "defy logic and they're unacceptable."

Tangeman said he was changing the policy.

"Illegal aliens that are wanted by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are going to be taken into custody at any location in the United States," he said.

Tangeman said available bed space should never be a factor when deciding whether to take an absconder.

"If this is someone who has a final order and he's been delivered and they no longer have a legal venue for appeals, they have to take them," he said.

"We're working to change the way that we do business," he said. Within hours, he sent immigration field offices a memo, a copy of which was made available to Cox Newspapers, giving the new instructions on accepting fugitives.

The policy change was announced amid failed attempts to reduce the absconder list, long a symbol of the nation's dysfunctional immigration system.

In December 2001, the immigration service announced that 314,000 people had disappeared after receiving final deportation orders.

The orders have been dubbed "run letters" by agency workers because 87 percent of the immigrants who receive them flee, according to a recent report by the Justice Department inspector general.

Immigration authorities in Atlanta say agents for bail bonding companies rarely apprehend and deliver immigrants who have received final orders of deportation. They said it has happened about "three of four times in the last 12 years."

When it does happen, authorities said, they take the immigrant into custody after verifying the deportation order. They said it does not matter whether an immigration judge in Atlanta or elsewhere ordered the immigrant's expulsion.

"An order of removal is valid nationwide," said Sue Brown, spokeswoman for the Atlanta office of the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement, one of the agencies that replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Most people ordered deported are like Martinez, who entered the country without papers to seek a job. Others are child molesters, deadbeat parents or spouse abusers. A few thousand come from countries where terrorist groups are active.

As of last month, 2,256 of the 314,000 absconders had been found, and 696 -- a small fraction of 1 percent -- had been removed from the country.

Even that effort has been like bailing out a boat that's springing new leaks. The absconder list grows by thousands each month and now has 389,000 names.

Most immigrants who are ordered deported are not held in custody, but are allowed to post bond and remain free until their deportation date.

The bond companies typically collect one-third to one-half of the bond from the immigrants, their friends or families, but are technically responsible for the entire amount if their client flees.

The extremely high absconder rate meant that the bond companies' debt to the government rose to more than $30 million, according to a recent federal report. That could mean financial disaster -- except for the fact that for more than a decade, the immigration service often collected about 30 cents of each dollar in forfeited bonds it was owed.

In recent months, federal officials launched an effort to collect that debt. That financial pressure has hit Capital Bonding Corp. of Reading, Pa., especially hard. The company writes about one-third of the immigration bonds nationwide.

Capital has announced it will no longer write immigration bonds and has hired bounty hunters such as Salerno to hunt down and deliver their missing clients.

That's what sent Salerno to Atlantic City, N.J., where he found Martinez hiding outside a house at 2 a.m. last Tuesday.

Hours later, the Honduran was swinging a bag containing his belongings over his shoulder as he walked toward the Philadelphia immigration office -- only to learn that he would not be going into federal custody just then.

Instead, he was directed to a waiting van, to be driven to Houston by transport agents from Capital Bonding.

Settling in the back seat, Martinez cheerfully shook hands with one of his bounty hunters and made it clear that his absconding days may not be over yet.

"I'll see you when I come back," he said with a laugh.

Staff writer Mark Bixler contributed to this article.