County expecting less federal money to house illegal immigrant inmates

8:59 PM, Jul 7, 2012
Written by Charles Davis
Green Bay Press-Gazette


FEDERAL FUNDING

Fiscal year | Amount | Illegal criminal immigrant | Unknown status
2011 | $111,853 | 82 | 158
2010 | $94,012 | 72 | 133
2009 | $85,099 | 74 | 117
2008 | $75,821 | 53 | 108
2007 | $77,597 | 37 | 112
Source: Bureau of Justice Assistance’s State Criminal Alien Assistance Program


Brown County Jail officials are bracing to lose thousands of dollars in federal funding for jail operating costs because of changes to a program that helps pay to house illegal immigrants.

The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, known as SCAAP, is administered by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance and helps cover a portion of jail costs for housing illegal immigrants who have been convicted of at least one felony or two misdemeanors. Eligible offenders also must have been housed at the jail for at least four consecutive days.

However, due to recent changes to help stretch limited funds, the program, which began in 1996, will no longer cover costs of housing inmates who are believed, but not proven, to be illegal immigrants.

That will impact jail funding because a portion of people arrested in Brown County each year who are born outside of the United States have an “unknown” status, which means it is unclear whether they are legally in the country.The jail received funding for inmates with an unknown status last year, but that changes this year.

“We know it’s going to impact us, but we don’t know the extent,” Brown County Jail security Lt. Phil Steffen said. “Everybody in the state is concerned about it.”

Last year, the Brown County Jail received $111,853 — the most the jail received from the program since $133,635 in 2002 — for housing inmates who were not born in the United States, according to SCAAP records. That money represents less than 1 percent of the county’s $16.3 million budget to run the jail, which houses about 750 inmates at one time.

Foreign inmates account for about 460 — or almost 4 percent — of the roughly 13,000 people arrested in Brown County each year, though Steffen said a loss of thousands in funding would be crucial because the money helps pay for staffing and inmate medical services, among other things.

Jail officials are awaiting a funding announcement in September to determine whether any services must be cut, Steffen said.

The rule change comes at a time when the Brown County Jail has seen an increase in its number of foreign inmates — including illegal immigrants and those with an unknown status.

In 2003, 10 Brown County Jail inmates were classified as illegal immigrants, while it was unknown whether another 72 inmates were in the country legally, according to SCAAP records. Last year, the program confirmed that 82 people were in the country illegally, while 158 inmates had an unknown status.

The majority of Brown County Jail’s foreign inmates are born in Mexico, though a growing number also hail from Thailand and various countries in the Caribbean and Central America, according to Brown County Jail records. Steffen said the jail population is a “direct reflection of the local community” and other inmates were born in Russia, Germany, Somalia and India, among other places.

Offenses vary from noncriminal disorderly conduct to serious violent crimes.

The process

When someone is booked into the Brown County Jail on suspicion of a felony, their fingerprints are automatically sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has a data-sharing system with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, through the Secure Communities initiative.

Under the system, ICE officials check to see if the person has a criminal background or immigration history. If a person is found in the ICE system with violations, authorities may decide to make an arrest, and they have 48 hours after the inmate’s scheduled release date to take the person into custody.

After a foreign suspect is booked into jail, their records also are sent to the ICE offices in Milwaukee, Steffen said.

The SCAAP program can find people who have had prior contact with law enforcement, but offenders who had never been arrested or had contact with immigration officials are not on record. That means the program is unable to confirm whether each foreign-born inmate at the Brown County Jail is in the country illegally. So for now, there is no system in place to track exactly how many illegal immigrants are housed yearly at the Brown County Jail.

Since 2008, the federal Secure Communities initiative has focused on deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds, said ICE regional spokeswoman Gail Montenegro.

Wisconsin jails started participating in the initiative’s data-sharing system in January 2011, and the program is expected to be implemented nationwide by 2013.

“What the immigration database contains is any record on a person who has ever had an encounter, be it legal or illegal, with federal immigration authorities,” Montenegro said.

Through April, the system identified 224 foreign inmates with previous criminal charges or convictions who were booked into the Brown County Jail. Through that data-sharing program, federal authorities have since deported 36 illegal immigrants from Brown County. That number trails only Dane, which had 46, and Milwaukee, with 113, of the counties in Wisconsin.

Of the 396,906 illegal immigrants removed from the U.S. from October 2010 to September 2011, almost 55 percent were those with criminal convictions — an 89 percent increase in the removal of such criminals from three years prior, according to ICE records. That number also is the largest number of such immigrants removed in the agency’s history.

Last month, President Barack Obama said his administration would allow some illegal immigrants — those younger than 30 who came to the United States before age 16, pose no criminal or security threat and were successful students or served in the military — to apply for a renewable two-year deferral from deportation. The policy also would allow those who are eligible to work legally in the nation.

The local picture

ICE estimates more than 10 million people are in the country illegally.

In Wisconsin, up to 200 beds each are available at the Kenosha and Dodge county jails to house foreigners who are in the deportation process, ICE spokeswoman Montenegro said.

That process could take as little as a few days for someone who had previously been ordered to leave the country, or could take more than a year in some cases, factoring in appeals, she said.

“Everyone is afforded due process,” Montenegro said.

ICE relies on the Brown County Jail to keep them informed about suspects who may be in the country illegally, she added.

“We collaborate with local law enforcement and historically have done so, and encourage them to contact us in a variety of ways when they have someone in their custody who they believe may be here in violation of immigration law; but each policy and procedure is up to that individual jail,” Montenegro said.

ICE does not open deportation cases on every Brown County jail inmate identified as an illegal immigrant, Steffen said. However, he added that it’s important to remove illegal immigrants with criminal records to make the community safer.

“Some of the folks ICE is targeting are not nice people, and those are the ones we want to remove from our community — legally and swiftly.”

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