Pinal County asks to end immigration detention contract

Bob Ortega, The Republic | azcentral.com12:33 p.m. MST April 16, 2014


(Photo: David Wallace/The Republic)

Pinal County Wednesday gave the federal government the equivalent of an eviction notice for immigrant detainees at the county jail.

County Manager Greg Stanley said that he sent a 100-day termination notice to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency contracts with the Pinal County Jail to hold immigrant detainees. He said Pinal County can't afford to continue housing detainees at the current rate of $59.64 per detainee.


ICE officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


More: Previous coverage


ICE contracts for 625 beds at the jail. Over the past year, the jail has housed an average of 566 immigrant detainees daily, according to ICE.

The jail has been in the cross-hairs of human-rights and immigrant rights groups. In 2012, Detention Watch Network named it one of the country's 10 worst immigration-detention facilities and asked the Obama administration to end the contract. The American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue ICE over conditions at the jail, citing poor sanitation and hygiene, lack of adequate medical care, and other complaints. However, the jail has passed repeated federal inspections.
But the contract has cost the county millions, according to county auditors.

The immigration detainees are held in a facility built in part to alleviate overcrowding at the old county jail by holding immigrants facing deportation on behalf of the federal government.


In 2004, the county jail was so overcrowded, with an average of 600 to 700 inmates in space meant for 400, that then Sheriff Roger Vanderpool made expansion a priority. To pay for it, he proposed to the county that the jail contract to house federal immigration detainees.

County supervisors agreed, and the county took on $62.1 million in debt in 2004 to expand the jail.


At the time the county issued the tax-exempt bonds, underwriters Stone & Youngberg said that for the plan to make sense financially, the county would have to charge ICE no less than $71 per day per detainee.


But the August 2006 contract paid $11.36 per detainee per day less than that.


Joe Pyritz, the county's interim communications director, said the county would be willing to consider continue the contract with ICE if the agency decides to pay more for holding detainees.


"We've been asking to discuss the per diem rate for more than a year," he said. "We want to keep ICE there, but we need the bump up in the per diem rate."


How will the county offset the loss of revenue from ICE for holding detainees?


"We're going to have to cross that bridge when we come to it," Pyritz said. "We'd have to work with the sheriff on an idea for what we'd do at that point.
"

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...tract/7784709/