Thursday, April 03, 2008
Editorial: Immigration control a brisk, costly business
Prince William is short on space, manpower and money because of its immigration crackdown.
From the RoundTable blog
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Since Prince William County police stepped up local enforcement of federal immigration laws March 3, they've made scores of arrests -- more than the county supervisors' chairman expected when he championed the initiative. He is pleased.
Manassas, meanwhile, is gearing up its own Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit. And the chairman of the board of the Prince William-Manassas regional jail, which has its own ICE program going, is worried. He says the extra costs and workload are not sustainable -- and this is before the regional facility has felt the full impact of the localities' newly aggressive stance.
The numbers warn that neither the state nor its localities can afford to fix what is wrong with federal immigration policy and enforcement. The pressure must be on Washington.
Prince William took on local ICE enforcement last July, and since then has detained more than 600 people for federal immigration authorities. Since a crackdown on illegal immigrants began March 3, The Washington Post reports, police have questioned 89 people about their citizenship status and have arrested 41 of them on various charges.
The county supervisors chairman, Corey Stewart, professed himself to be "pleasantly surprised by the numbers," The Post reports. If so, he is ignoring these:
ICE is supposed to pick up detainees within 72 hours, but Prince William's jail superintendent reported a two- to three-week lag time that is busting the jail's budget and stretching its manpower. An ICE spokesman said the agency can't handle the influx of detainees.
The regional jail agreed last year to process about 40 inmates a month for deportation. But the jail board chairman, Patrick Hurd, wrote in a recent letter to Stewart and the mayor of Manassas that ICE-trained personnel have processed almost 1,200 inmates since July, and placed ICE detainers on 632.
Lack of bed space has forced the regional facility to farm out prisoners at a cost of $220,000 a month, Hurd wrote, and the jail's six ICE-trained officers are working an average of 60 hours a week. The Potomac News quotes Hurd saying in his letter that without added staff, "we must expect that the fatigue associated with this constant overtime will take its toll and these trained officers will not continue in this position."
Already, the county is looking at raising its real estate tax rate by 27 percent, to $1 for every $100 of assessed value, to fund a budget that includes $6.4 million for the first year of its illegal immigrant crackdown. The county expects the cost over five years to be $26 million. The way things are going, it's likely to be more.
Stewart isn't so pleased with those numbers. He voted against a tax increase. Of course.
