ICE announced the launch of its Online Detainee Locator System (ODLS), after months of promising the locator system as part of their 2009 reform. The locator will provide information on the current holding facility, phone number, and contact information for the regional office. Two different methods, users can search is by alien registration number and country of birth or first and last name, country of birth, and date of birthday.
For more: The ODLS is located on ICE’s public website, http://www.ice.gov,

ICE plans to make nine facilities more humane, by eliminating lock-downs, increasing visitor time, and providing e-mail access and Internet-based free phone service, the agency says.
The list of changes were leaked in a memo to the Houston Chronicle this week as it begins to implement the changes in low-risk units. Some of the changes will take place in 30 days, while others will take longer.
Other changes to be implemented will include allowing detainees to wear regular clothes, offering movie nights, bingo, dance and cooking classes, fresh plants, and four hours …

Texas Bid’ness launched a new map that looks at Texas’ private prisons. The state which has more than 70 for-profit prisons, jails, and detention centers, deals with private operators who include GEO, MTC, and CCA (a company that Business of Detention has reported on in the past), among others. The map includes facility pages and company pages.
Click to go to map.

John Morton made his case to the Appropriations Committee last week requesting $2.6 billion for FY2011, an additional $20 million above last year for the Detention and Removal Operations.
ICE is proposing an overall FY 2011 budget of $5.8 billion, an increase of 2 percent over the FY 2010 budget.
Questioned why not not all 33,400 beds were being utilized, Morton said they could not afford the 33,400 beds, because the funding budgeted for the 33,400 were based on $99 a day vs. the $122 a day that ICE now has …

We wrote last week that CCA will likely bid on a new detention center in Los Angeles.  Andrew Becker at the Center for Investigative Reporting blogs today that ICE will soon begin collecting proposals:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, posted an online notice this week stating that it intends to open bids on Dec. 15 for a contractor to own and operate a low-custody detention facility for men.
The facility would be one of the largest immigration lock-ups in the country. Continuing a policy pushed …

In earnings reports released this week the nation’s two largest private prison operators cited “significant growth opportunities” for detaining immigrants, driven largely by the Obama administration’s emphasis on detaining “criminal aliens.”
The GEO Group – an international private prison operator that draws about 75 percent of its revenue from controlling a quarter of the U.S. private prison industry – said it believes that “this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport “criminal aliens” throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years.”
A …

The Center for Investigative Reporting report that:
A second high-ranking official in a two-month-old federal office that oversees immigration detention policy and planning has left the government, sources say.
Cree Zischke, tasked with addressing detainee health care issues for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning, departed just weeks after her boss, Dr. Dora Schriro, left ICE in late September to become commissioner of New York City’s jails.
“I am no longer with the ICE Office of Detention Planning and Policy (sic),” she wrote in an out-of-office auto-reply received on …