By Eunice Lee/The Star-Ledger
on April 29, 2013 at 3:20 PM, updated April 29, 2013 at 3:21 PM

FREEHOLD - All detainees have been removed from the Monmouth County jail's immigrant detention operation, county officials confirmed today.

The numbers of immigrant detainees held at the jail under a federal contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, were reduced over several weeks but sheriff's spokeswoman Cynthia Scott said that all remaining ICE detainees were removed Friday.

The facility held an average of 200 ICE inmates daily before it began to reduce its population of detainees in recent weeks, Scott said.

ICE made the decision to pull the remaining detainees from the jail, Scott said.

However ICE spokesman Luis Martinez said "it was a mutual decision" with the county, but declined to elaborate.

The sheriff's department, which has housed ICE detainees since 2007, previously said that it had requested ICE send fewer detainees due to efforts to reduce corrections officers' overtime by shutting down various wings.

Federal contracts to house ICE detainees often mean lucrative deals for local governments and private correctional facilities. In Essex County, for example, the federal government pays the county $108 per day to house detainees at its jail in Newark and at an adjacent, privately-run facility that subcontracts with Essex called Delaney Hall.

In addition to the Monmouth County jail, six other facilities in the state, both public and private, have contracts to house ICE detainees.

Karina Wilkinson, co-founder of the Monmouth County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, called for ICE to reduce its detainee population on a national scale.

"We continue to call for the release of people who are unnecessarily detained, not only for economic reasons, but also for humanitarian and moral reasons."

It was not immediately clear whether ICE planned to close, or reduce, its operations at other facilities in New Jersey.

http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf...perations.html