Over the last couple of months, our previous Farmville post has resulted in several comments about the facility and its operations. We encourage individuals to write us at deportationnation [at] gmail.com with tips.

Our current project Deportation Nation, is a follow-up to Business of Detention, and home of an independent investigation that critically examines the increase in detention of innocent and low-level immigrant offenders as a result of enforcement programs mandated to target “dangerous criminal aliens,” specifically the Secure Communities program.

We’re currently on hiatus at Business of Detention, but we’re excited to announce our ambitious new project Deportation Nation.

DeportationNation.org is the home of an independent investigative reporting project that critically examines the increase in detention of innocent and low-level immigrant offenders as a result of enforcement programs mandated to target “dangerous criminal aliens.”

We focus in particular on Secure Communities, a program that relies on police in local jails to enter arrest data into a joint FBI and Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) database. ICE officers then decide whether to assume custody of immigrants matched in the system and begin deportation proceedings. The program began in Texas in late 2008, is now in place in 200 counties in 21 states, and is set to be deployed nationwide by 2013.

The government’s data reveals Secure Communities has already strayed from its mandate to prioritize the identification and deportation immigrant “level 1 offenders” who commit felonies such as robbery or murder. During the program’s first year it identified 119,052 criminal aliens, leading to the deportation of 1,191 high level offenders and 14,615 immigrants convicted of lesser offenses.

How We Do it

Deportation Nation is reported by Renée Feltz and Stokely Baksh, and funded in part by a grant from the Soros Justice Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute. Our project is pro-justice, and we we aim to be fair, accurate and comprehensive in our reporting.

This website includes print and multimedia stories published here and with our media partners, a blog, news feeds and an interactive library of useful data and documents. We embrace the use online tools for crowd sourcing, data sharing, and collaboration.

Most of our reports and graphics are free to republish. We simply request that you credit us and link to our website. Please do not edit our content or repackage it for sale. If you publish our work online, include all links. Email questions to deportationnation at gmail dot com.

For more: The ODLS is located on ICE’s public website, http://www.ice.gov,

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 of recreation. ICE says that there will be no additional costs as a result of these changes.

The nine CCA facilities include Florence Service Processing Center, Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, Eloy Detention Center, Houston Contract Detention Center, Laredo Contract Detention Facility, North Georgia Detention Center, Otay Detention Center, Stewart Detention Center, and T. Don Hutto Detention Center.

It is unknown whether other facilities such as those owned be GEO Group will make changes or whether the nine CCA facilities will become the sole hub for low-risk detainees. Currently, ICE has agreements with almost 300 facilities to hold detainees. The CCA facilities are some of the largest facilities holding detainees today, which in the past has been scolded for inhumane conditions.

While ICE Union reps argue that these new changes raise safety questions, immigration advocate welcome the changes. This is a huge win for advocates, who have been pressuring the Obama administration for comprehensive immigration reform — especially since reform is likely to go untouched in Congress before the 2010 mid-term election.

Click to go to map.

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 to pay. Only 29,192 beds are currently being used. Despite the increase in costs, Morton assured committee leaders that ICE was not diverting funds away from bed space and would be using all beds in the future.

The criticism in bed space comes after some reports suggest that ICE my be releasing suspected illegal immigrants from their custody due to a lack of space and funding. Earlier this year, the Houston Chronicle obtained information a Freedom of Information Act request suggesting just that. While ICE has rejected this notion, ICE’s Union has reported significant bed space and funding shortages.

“I really believe that it’s a nationwide problem,” Chris Crane, ICE Council 118’s vice president for Detention and Removal Operations told the Houston Chronicle. “I’m hesitant for the sake of employees to say where some of these locations are, but I have talked to some agents who said their districts have run out of funds for bed space and are ordering their officers to release as many prisoners as possible.”

Morton at the hearing also called the Secure Communities the wave of the future. Secure Communities
is a program that allows state and local police to check the fingerprints of an individual they book against ICE and FBI databases and is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2013.

According to Morton, as of December 2009, over 1.34 million finger prints submissions has resulted in
arrests of 146,000 criminal aliens, of which 23,000 have been removed. Late last year, the agency boasted that it had identified more than 11,000 aliens charged or convicted with level 1 crimes through Secure Communities, while 100,000 aliens were charged with or convicted of level 2 and level 3 crimes.
Meanwhile, the number of criminal aliens identified by the 287(g) program – which trains local police to enforce immigration laws – increased by 46 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

Morton expects that 80 percent of the detention space will be used for the criminal alien population, which may distort cost proposals to create a more civil detention system, if more detention facilities will be used to house the criminal population.

However, questioned whether ICE was also maintaining arrests of non-criminals, Morton said that the removal of non-criminal aliens was at its highest in ICE history.

Download Morton’s written testimony to read more.

http://appropriations.house.gov/Witness_testimony/HS/John_Morton.3.18.10.pdf

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 under the Bush administration, the Obama team has moved to deport more criminal aliens, which has also driven a need for more bed space.

None of the major private prison operators are listed among the interested vendors right now. Read the full post here.

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 Third Quarter earnings report released on Monday shows The GEO Group is adding another 1,100 beds to its Aurora, Colorado, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center for a total of 1,532 beds. As part of its renewed contract with ICE for the continued management of our Northwest Detention Center, capacity there will be increased from 1,030 to 1,575 beds.

Today Corrections Corporation of America – which manages more than 50 percent of all prison beds under private contract in the United States – said in its Third Quarter earnings report that revenue from its federal customers increased 4.9 percent, “primarily driven by the commencement of our new management contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons at our newly constructed Adams County Correctional Center.” This facility in Natchez, Mississippi houses 2,567 “criminal alien offenders – low-security illegal immigrants who committed offenses in the United States and will be returned to their country of origin upon completion of their sentence.”

The company’s newly appointed CEO, Damon Hininger, told investors during a conference call that the company continues to focus on filling vacant capacity. He said he was pleased with an increase of 1,300 immigrant detainees in CCA’s U.S. Marshall’s facilities since January 2009. The company recently completed renovations of its 502-bed North Georgia Detention Center. It began receiving detainees from ICE in October and currently houses about 100 people.

Hininger said CCA has its eye on an ICE contract to build and operate a new 2,200-bed detention center in Los Angeles, and expects a procurement as early as December, though the company is not listed among the interested vendors on a government website listing the request for proposals for the contract.

Funding for expanded immigrant detention is provided in the FY2010 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a member agency. President Obama signed the budget into law on October 29. It includes $5.4 billion for ICE, about half a billion more than in FY2009. From this amount, $2.5 billion is allocated for detention and removal operations, and at least $200 million is provided for the Secure Communities program, which began in 2008 to screen for undocumented immigrants by taking the fingerprints of anyone booked into a local jail and checking for a match in ICE’s database.

Critics like Joan Friedland, Immigration Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center, have noted that as of March 22, 2009, “19,495 individuals were identified as undocumented through the Secure Communities program. Of these, only 1,436 were identified as ‘Level 1 criminals.’ The rest were arrested for lesser crimes, which include minor traffic offenses like driving without a license.”

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 Oct. 14 by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Sources this week confirmed that Zischke is no longer with ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and has returned to the private sector. Calls seeking comment from Zischke were not returned.

Read the full report here.

“The government has recognized that it has a massive system with serious problems, and has identified steps to ameliorate the situation,” said Linton Joaquin, the National Immigration Law Center’s general counsel, one of several advocacy organizations to respond to the report with mixed reviews. “However, the steps they propose taking in the short and intermediate term are limited compared to the size of the problem.

Other advocates appreciated the review’s distinction that that “the majority of the population is characterized as low custody, or having a low propensity for violence,” and yet are housed in prison-like conditions. One of the review’s recommendations is to expand Alternatives to Detention programs so that nonviolent detainees can be housed in residential facilities or monitored with electronic ankle bracelets. Some reports indicate detainees could be housed in converted hotels – which would be a return to ICE’s roots in the 1980s.

The reviewers note that the Detention and Removal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “limited in-house expertise on this subject matter” and that “the establishment of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning is a critical first step,” which suggests the expansion of alternatives take a while.

Both reduction of the detainee population and legally enforceable standards were called for by the National Immigration Law Center in its July 2009 report, “A Broken System,” as essential to fixing the nation’s broken detention system, but ICE’s review makes no promises regarding these recommendations. A section of the report focuses on the shortage of detention space that is close to key arrest sites (click on the map at left to read this section of the report).

The nation’s two leading prison companies have remained quiet since the report’s release, and ICE did not say whether it had consulted CCA or Geo Group during its review. During recent conference calls with investors, CCA officials noted that in the Obama administration’s proposed 2010 budget “there was no significant changes to funding as it relates to our book of business.”

Indeed, ICE’s report made no indication that there will be a decline in immigrant detainees under the supervision of private companies that own and operate much of the detention system. According to the review, approximately 88% of the detainee population is held in 69 facilities. Fifty percent of the detained population is in 21 of these facilities – of which seven are Service Processing Centers owned by ICE and operated by the private sector; seven are dedicated Contract Detention Facilities owned and operated by the private sector; and seven are dedicated county jail facilities, with which ICE maintains intergovernmental agency service agreements.

The report calls for expert federal officials to be placed on-site to oversee detention operations at these facilities, to intercede as necessary, and to ensure that there are appropriate grievance and disciplinary processes.