Inside Bush's Billion-Dollar Immigration Gulag

By Tom Barry, Americas Policy Program. Posted June 23, 2008.

The next administration will face an out-of-control immigration enforcement regime that consigns immigrants to a labyrinth of unregulated detention centers, jails, and prisons throughout the country.

While the scope of the detention and imprisonment of immigrants has been greatly expanded by the Bush administration, the problem of unregulated immigrant detention is not new. In the 1990s, increased immigrant detention and federal prison overcrowding led to an outsourcing boom. Instead of being held in federal prisons and detention centers, arrested immigrants increasingly were held in local, state, and privately owned jails and prisons.

But the boom in contracted detention beds for federal detainees produced a series of scandals that alarmed many in Congress. Gross human rights abuses and millions of dollars in overcharges persuaded Congress, prodded by immigrant and prisoner advocates, to create the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT) in the Justice Department (DOJ) in 2000. The newly established OFDT, which opened in September 2001, was authorized to coordinate all outsourcing of federal detainees and oversee the implementation of the new detention standards adopted in 2000.

But the onset of the war on terrorism and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in March 2003 sidelined OFDT's coordination mission. Instead of centralizing detention operations for federal detainees held in non-federal facilities, detention operations have quickly become less coordinated, more diffuse, and riddled with abuse.

The Bush administration is fulfilling its promise that there will be sufficient prison beds for all the immigrants caught in the Department of Homeland Security's widening immigrant round-up. In the detention business, bed is a euphemism for jail space.

Supported by generous budget increases for its immigration initiatives, Congress and the Bush administration have approved funding for a major increase in beds for immigrants—as long as they're locked up. Homeland Security has created a national network of bed providers in county, state, and federal facilities. Similarly, the Justice Department has seen major increases in its budget for housing and transporting immigrants through its U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and OFDT.

While the current focus on immigrants as security threats started in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, the drive to increase the number of beds for arrested immigrants began in earnest in 2004. At the insistence of immigration restrictionists like Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and the Immigration Reform Caucus, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 contained an authorization for an additional 40,000 beds to accommodate immigrants held for immigration violations.

Two years later in a major speech on immigration policy on May 15, 2006, President Bush assured the nation that the U.S. government was well on the way to securing the U.S. southern border, noting, "We've expanded the number of beds in our detention facilities, and we will continue to add more."

In an August 2006 visit to the U.S.-Mexico border to promote his immigration policy, President Bush repeated his determination to increase jail space for immigrants. "Step 1," he said, "is to add detention beds."

Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency responsible for immigrant "detention and removal," has 32,000 beds at its immediate disposition, with another 1,000 scheduled to come on line in 2009. In 2008 ICE is spending $1.7 billion on immigrant detention, in addition to the $700 million for enforcement and removal operations.

DHS says it can guarantee the availability of a bed for any immigrant in its care. At the onset of the immigration crackdown two years ago, ICE dubbed its promise to find a detention center or prison bed for all arrested immigrants "Operation Reservation Guaranteed." That operation has been subsumed into ICE's Detention Operations Coordination Center.

The Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals Service has beds available for detainees—about 180,000 a year, of whom more than 30% are held on immigration charges.

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Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) of the Center for International Policy.

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