Jailed immigrants buoy budgets (The Boston Globe)

Jailed immigrants buoy budgets
US pays sheriffs $90 per day to hold those awaiting deportation

By Maria Sacchetti
Globe Staff / February 9, 2009

NORTH DARTMOUTH - In the newest wing of Bristol County jail, exclusively for immigrants facing deportation, inmates in sunshine-yellow uniforms pass the time in a stuffy dormitory playing cards, flipping through magazines, and chatting in Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.

Anxiety and boredom fill the room. "It's been 10 months," one desperate-looking man told Sheriff Thomas Hodgson in Spanish during a recent tour of the only freestanding immigrant detention center in Massachusetts. "How long do I have to wait?"

The answer isn't clear. But Hodgson, and other sheriffs across the state, are glad to have them: For each immigrant, they receive an average of $90 a day.

Bristol and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them. Bristol County alone has raked in $33 million since 2001, and has used the money to transform itself into a sprawling campus with a commissary, an ambulance communications center, and a "management accountability building" for regular meetings on jail operations.

"That money is a tremendous boost for us," said Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald Jr., whose jail houses 324 immigrants, up from 44 a decade ago, bringing in $15.6 million last year. "We aggressively try to market ourselves to get as many of those inmates into our doors as we can."

But advocates for immigrants say the government should dramatically reduce the number of detainees, by releasing them pending deportation. They complain about the burden on taxpayers - this year, the federal government budgeted $1.7 billion nationwide and $42.8 million in New England for detainees - and the risks to immigrants.

Last year, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a native of China who overstayed his visa, died of cancer after being detained at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island. A federal inquiry found that jail officials denied his requests for medical care and other services, and that has accelerated calls to release detainees such as Ng who do not have criminal records. In Massachusetts, a majority of detainees are being held for immigration violations, not crimes, and are kept apart from the general jail population.

"The man who died at Wyatt shouldn't have been in detention at all," said Sara Ignatius, executive director of the Boston-based Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project. "Eighty to 90 dollars a day to lock up somebody who's just overstayed their visa? It just seems like a very inappropriate way to spend federal money."

Nationwide, federal statistics show that 30,000 immigrant detainees are held on any given day, almost four times as many as in 1995. New England has an average of 1,365 detainees a day. Local federal officials did not have figures before 2003, but the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project said the tally is triple the number of detainees a decade ago.

Immigration lawyers and federal officials attribute the spike to a variety of circumstances: tougher immigration laws; heightened scrutiny of immigrants after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks; and intensified immigration raids around the country under the Bush administration.

Bruce Chadbourne, field office director for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said detaining immigrants ensures they are deported, but he cautioned that the process is not always swift. Nationally, detainees spend an average of 30 days in jail.

"It's not an easy process of just getting an order on a person, buying him a plane ticket, getting them a passport, and putting them on a plane and letting them go," he said.

The vast majority of immigrant detainees in New England are held at four Massachusetts jails, in Plymouth, Bristol, Suffolk, and Franklin counties. And they are transforming law enforcement in ways those sheriffs never envisioned.

In Franklin County, which houses 75 immigrants a day on average, triple the number 10 years ago, the sheriff just installed equipment so that immigrant detainees can have "video hearings" to save on transportation costs to court. In Plymouth, the sheriff's department often backs up federal immigration agents on sweeps. In Bristol County, officials transport immigrants as far away as Pennsylvania, and drive immigrants daily to immigration court in Boston, where the officers double as court security.

In the Suffolk County jail, 269 immigrants now fill Building 8, which was empty before 2003 because its open floor plan made it a security risk for the general prison population. Instead of having to remodel the new $20 million building, Sheriff Andrea Cabral began housing immigrants there, bringing in $10 million a year.

"The revenue that is generated from this has been a lifesaver for my budget," Cabral said. "Otherwise the building would be empty, and I'd be struggling a lot more with some of the issues that we've had."

County officials say the additional federal funding also benefits detainees themselves, by allowing them to stay near their families and lawyers instead of being spirited to a detention center in another region.

The extra funding, meanwhile, injects cash into communities that are struggling during the economic downturn. By expanding the number of immigrants, Bristol jail managed to build five buildings on the campus and expand services that help the entire county, such as a communications unit that patches ambulance drivers through to hospitals, the sheriff said.

"I could just sit here and be lazy and say that's somebody else's problem," Hodgson said of the decision to house immigrant detainees. "This is an opportunity for us to solve a lot of problems and benefit the people of our community."

One recent day, Hodgson led a Globe reporter on a tour of the cinder block-gray Bristol County campus - perhaps the jail that has been most transformed by immigration in Massachusetts. A cost-conscious Republican, he is not known for coddling inmates - he recently switched all inmates to Tang because it is cheaper than orange juice. He also believes illegal immigrants should be deported, in most cases.

But the son of an English immigrant has also lobbied Congress for reforms and worked with foreign officials to smooth the deportation process. He owns a vacation home in the Azores now because he has made so many consulting trips there.

During the tour, immigrants peppered him with questions, asking him when they can leave or complaining about healthcare, the food, or the stuffy air.

In the gymnasium, where immigrants sleep on bunk beds arranged in neat rows on the basketball court, an Iraqi national pointed to his misshapen elbow and said he needed medical care. After they chatted, the sheriff said the man was getting treatment.

Up the road, immigrants in the new $4.2 million immigration building begged the sheriff for information about their cases. But he said their fate is in the hands of federal officials and immigration judges.

The detainees, who do not have the right to grant interviews without the permission of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expressed frustration that the reporter was not allowed to interview them.

"We don't know anything," an immigrant told Hodgson in Spanish. "Nothing, nothing, nothing."

Before he left, Hodgson stopped to chat with a young immigrant who said he had been in the United States almost 10 years. Sitting on the bunk, the man smiled as he told the sheriff about a picturesque little island off Portugal where he is from.

"I'll probably be going very soon," the man said in English.

Unlike regular inmates, immigrants do not know when their jail time will end and are not entitled to free lawyers to plead their case before a judge.

"It's not fair," complained one immigrant wearing a wedding ring.

"Nothing is fair," another man said, and made his way back to his bunk.