Street Roots • May 12-18, 2017
News
Page 5
ICE, from page 4
$1 million in ICE revenue to cover 40
inmates per day. Altogether, the facility has
up to 212 adult beds. The jail also has
juvenile facilities for youths as young as 12,
and reports holding juvenile ICE detainees
in addition to adults.
Jails commonly contract with multiple
government agencies, including the U.S.
Marshals Service and tribal organizations.
Locally, NORCOR has also contracted with
Wheeler, Skamania, Klickitat and Jefferson
counties. Down the road, Umatilla County
Jail takes in ICE detainees on a short-term
basis, receiving $50 per person for the
night. In perennially cash-strapped
Josephine County, ICE has temporarily
housed numerous detainees in the local jail
as part of an intergovernmental agreement.
In fact, there are 211 immigration
detention facilities across the country, said
Christina Fiahlo, an attorney and the
co-founder and executive director of
Community Initiatives for Visiting
Immigrants in Confinement, or CIVIC. Of
those, 147 of them are county or city jails
that contract with ICE. The vast majority of
detainees, however, are held in privately run
facilities, such as the Tacoma detention
center.
CIVIC is a national immigration detention
visitation network with the mission of
ending U.S. immigration detention. The
organization visits people in 43 of the
largest immigration detention facilities and
operates a national hotline that allows
detainees to call in for free and report
human and civil rights violations.
“ICE has already begun to renegotiate
some contracts to expand the number of
people that can be detained at various
county jails,” Fiahlo said. “The federal
government usually pays the private prison
or the county a set dollar amount per
person per day. So, if the number of people
in detention in a county increases, then the
county stands to benefit financially.”
According to the April meeting minutes
of NORCOR’s Board of Directors, the fees
charged for additional contract beds exceed
the cost of housing the contract detainees,
which runs about $18 to $22 per person per
day. The contract money fully covers that
cost, with the rest going to offset the cost to
the four counties for housing local inmates -
which runs about $150 per person per day,
NORCOR Administrator Bryan Brandenburg
told the directors. The minutes are available
in draft form on NORCOR’s website.
Fiahlo said local jails can also make
additional money off detainees through
immigrant labor, lucrative private prison
phone contracts, and commissary revenue,
among other charges. For example, video
visitation services cost $7.50 for a half hour.
Aside from attorney visits, there are no face-
to-face meetings allowed between the
detainees and visitors. Telephone calls cost
25 cents per minute at NORCOR.
And the Trump administration’s order
expanding deportation actions is expected
to exacerbate the length of detentions,
which are already protracted by a nationwide
backlog of cases in the immigration courts.
The longer a detainee is incarcerated, the
more revenue he or she will generate.
The Department of Homeland Security,
which oversees ICE, reported in February
that there were 534,000 cases pending on
immigration court dockets nationwide - a
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record high.
“Trump’s obsession with imprisoning
people for profit is both fiscally
irresponsible and morally bankrupt,” Fiahlo
said. “There are community-based
alternatives to detention that are more
humane and less costly than detention.
However, as long as counties stand to profit
from imprisoning immigrants, Congress
seems to have little incentive to curtail
immigration detention expansion.”
regon statute states that no Oregon law
enforcement agency shall use agency
moneys, equipment or personnel for the
purpose of detecting or apprehending
people whose only violation is against
federal immigration laws. Nonetheless, in
years past, ICE encouraged cooperation
through its Secure Communities and related
programs that authorized local officers to
perform immigration enforcement, including
holding detainees.
In 2014, a lawsuit against Clackamas
County helped dismantle the practice of
these so-called ICE holds in Oregon. In
Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas County, a
district judge ruled that the practice violates
Fourth Amendment rights, that the
detention in that case was unlawful, and that
the jail had legal standing to refuse ICE’s
request to hold someone beyond their legal
authority. Counties that said they had been
cooperating with ICE on immigration holds
soon said they were ceasing to do so in
accordance with state law.
O
By 2015, the federal Secure Communities
program was officially discontinued, and
replaced with the Priority Enforcement'
Program. Trump’s executive order
reinstates Secure Communities. The
Department of Homeland Security says it
will require local law enforcement agencies
to cooperate with federal immigration cases
and even have local officers deputized as
immigration agents to make arrests.
Brandenburg, NORCOR’s administrator,
told Street Roots they weren’t violating state
statute. The relationship is a contractual
one, with ICE covering all the costs of
holding the detainees.
“They move people in and out of here
fairly regularly,” Brandenburg said. “And it’s
usually based on the fact that they’re
overcrowded, and currently they’re not
overcrowded, which is why we have so few
folks at NORCOR.”
As of press time, Brandenburg confirmed
there were four ICE detainees at NORCOR,
but they have accommodated around 40 at a
time in the past.
The ACLU’s dos Santos said he still
believes the statute applies, regardless of
whether the jail is getting paid for the
service.
“In fact the law says the exact opposite,”
dos Santos said. “You’re not allowed to use
money, but you’re also not allowed to use
facilities or personnel. If it was just about
money, why include facilities or personnel?”
NORCOR policy states that all detainees
that are sent to NORCOR have final removal
orders and are awaiting completion of the
process. The NORCOR policy also states,
PH O TO BY JO A N N E ZU H L
A close-up of a banner displayed at the May 6 rally outside NORCOR in solidarity with
detained hunger strikers and in protest of allowing ICE detainees to be incarcerated there.
however, that it does turn information on its
arrestees over to ICE and that jail staff will
detain a person if NORCOR receives a
formal order from ICE to do so.
Last week, a spokeswoman for Oregon
Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The
Associated Press that because NORCOR
isn’t using resources to detect or apprehend
people, it does not appear to be violating
state statute.
dos Santos disagreed with the attorney
general’s position.
“It’s an unfortunate statement, and it’s
also legally incorrect,” dos Santos said. “I
think that the state has the prerogative for
limiting agencies and what actions they can
take. And this law has existed since 1987,
and it’s absolutely within the state’s
jurisdiction to prohibit agencies like law
enforcement from enforcing federal
immigration law. That’s really what the 10th
Amendment is all about, right? The federal
government cannot commandeer state
resources. It’s different with the state saying
we’re OK with it. If the state says we’re not
OK with it, the 10th Amendment is a hard
stop.”
If the Oregon statute appears to be in the
way of federal policy, a repeal effort hopes
to clear the path. A small group of Oregon
lawmakers have put forward a bill to not
only end the statute, but also require that
local law enforcement cooperate with ICE
and comply with immigration detainer
requests. Without leadership support, the
bill is unlikely to go anywhere, and Gov.
Kate Brown has reaffirmed the state statute
with an executive order.
In California, lawmakers are considering a
bill intended to take out the financial
incentive to overbuild for outside interests
such as ICE by cutting off expansion and
improvement funds to facilities that lease
space to public and private entities. The
“Dignity not Detention” bill doesn’t abolish
those contracts with ICE, but those facilities
that continue to contract with ICE after
2018 would not receive prison realignment
funds. And it also puts a 10-year moratorium
on any jail receiving the funds from renting
out the space after an expansion. The bill
would not affect jails that rent only to county
or state entities.
The bill is of particular interest to the
people in Contra Costa County, Calif., where
the local jail leases 200 beds to ICE in
exchange for $3 million a year. Meanwhile,
the county is moving forward to seek a $70
million grant from the state to add a new
wing with space for 400 beds.
Another proposal in California would
adopt similar language to Oregon’s statute
to “prohibit state and local law enforcement
agencies, including school police and
security departments, from using resources
to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect, or
arrest persons for immigration enforcement
purposes.”
The state of California is second only to
Texas in the number of detainees in ICE
custody.
This month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot
signed into law a policy that bans sanctuary
cities in that state, requiring local law
officers there to work on federal
immigration enforcement, regardless of local
ordinances. In its crosshairs is Travis
County, home of Austin, which currently
restricts local officers from cooperating with
immigration enforcement.
See ICE, page 7