House Committee Demands More Detentions

From Royce Bernstein Murray of The Hill:

House budget bill attempts to thwart Congress’s progress on immigration detention reform

Even as the Senate and House Judiciary committees last week made important strides toward common-sense and humane immigration reform, the House Appropriations Committee took a giant leap backward when it created new immigration detention rules that will waste government resources and continue to unnecessarily incarcerate thousands of people.

The appropriations committee voted to include a provision in the 2014 Department of Homeland Security budget which requires that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fill 34,000 jail and prison beds each night with immigrants facing deportation. Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) noted during the debate that the detention bed mandate is “arbitrary,” yet the committee voted to increase the quota by 600 beds over its current level. At $164 per person per night, such a mandate is a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars to hold individuals who pose no threat to the community and are facing only civil proceedings. Effective alternatives to detention cost 30 cents to $14 per detainee per day. Even the criminal justice system commonly uses an array of less-costly custody options, such as electronic monitoring and house arrest to meet pre-trial and post-sentencing needs.

In addition to expanding the bed quota, the Appropriations Committee added a requirement that ICE provide the committee with information about every detainee the agency administratively releases and ICE’s rationale for releasing each individual. This micro-managing approach is operationally infeasible and impractical. ICE detains more than 400,000 non-citizens each year and regularly uses a risk-assessment tool to determine the need to detain or release many of the individuals in its custody.

The committee’s vote contradicts statements and actions other members of Congress made in recent days to reduce the use of expensive and inhumane detention. Read more…

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