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States: “Help Us,
Criminal Illegals Swamp Budgets, Prisons”
By John Ransom
The General Accounting Office estimates that as of 2009 there were
currently about 350,000 criminal aliens in U.S. prisons, “the majority
from Mexico.” At $30,000 per year, per inmate, that’s $11 billion
annually, with most of the costs born by the states.
While not all of the criminal aliens are here illegally, criminal
illegals are putting a strain on budgets, especially in the states with
large illegal immigration populations such as Arizona, Colorado,
California, Florida, New York, and Texas.
Not coincidentally, many of those same states are facing the largest
budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2011 and 2012, including New York and
California. Some estimate state budget shortfalls of over $100 billion
in 2012 across state governments in the U.S.
In California, it’s estimated that prisoners who are illegal immigrants
cost the state at least $1 billion per year just to keep them in prison.
Across the country, states’ governments are shouldering both the
growing financial burden of keeping criminal illegal aliens in jail and
the growing law enforcement burden of securing the community from the
crimes of illegal aliens in the face of hostility from the executive
branch of the federal government.
Corrections.com trumpets the problem as “Foreign Inmates Busting
Budgets.”
“There’s no question illegal immigration continues to be a large and
costly problem in California and around the nation,” Rep. Kevin
McCarthy, a Republican from CA-22, told Bakersfield’s Eyewitness News.
“The first and most important step to addressing this problem is
securing our border. The federal government can and should do more to
ensure our border is secure, including more physical barriers, border
patrol and electronic surveillance.”
The Denver Post reports that foreign-born inmates are the fastest
growing segment of the prison population in the Mile High state. The
number in U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
detainers in Colorado prisons “have more than doubled in 10 years from
680 to 1,500, said Tom Clements, executive director of the state
Department of Corrections,” according to the Post.
“That’s huge,” Clements emphasized.
As the economy continues to stumble, states are getting pinched hard by
the federal government because they refuse to address immigration
reform.
In Colorado, Attorney General John Suthers estimates that the cost to
house prisoners in the U.S. illegally was $58 million in 2008.
“At the time, the federal government’s State Criminal Alien Assistance
Program reimbursed Colorado $3.3 million, or about 6 percent of the
state’s costs,” says the Post. “The amount has since dropped to $2.9
million even as the number of foreign inmates continues to rise.”
These costs have likely grown since 2008 even while federal assistance
has dropped.
In California, both Democrats and Republicans are asking President
Obama to fund what Colorado’s AG, John Suthers, decries as just another
unfunded mandate by the federal government.
“To receive less than full reimbursement for the use of state
facilities to house illegal immigrants is an unacceptable, unfunded
federal mandate,” Suthers said according to the Post.
In California, Democrat Congressman Jim Costa said that “California
cannot and should not have to shoulder this burden alone,” according to
Bakersfield Now. He called upon the federal government to fully fund
the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program to help reimburse the costs
of detaining illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.
But even fully funded, the program just transfers the burden across the
country into the wallets of taxpayers from all of the states rather
than addressing the issue in any substantive way.
The costs are not just financial either.
In California, the feds have ordered that 33,000 prisoners be released
to relieve over-crowding in state prisons. Bakersfield Now estimates
that about 20,000 of the states’ 162,000 prisoners are in the U.S.
illegally. In other words, they make up about 60 percent of the
overcrowding in California prisons while accounting for 13 percent of
the prisons’ population.
While it’s unclear how California will comply with the ruling to
release prisoners, it’s clear that they will not be able to deport
illegal immigrants discharged from prison under the ruling. Instead,
they can either be released on parole or can be turned over to the U.S.
Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.
In Texas, “[l]aw enforcement and prison officials have complained that
many of the convicts who are paroled to be deported are never sent
home, and they end up committing new crimes and getting rearrested,”
says the Statesman.com.
That’s in part because under a Supreme Court ruling Clark v. Martinez,
ICE can only hold criminal illegal aliens for six months if the convict
can’t be repatriated to another country.
“Because of the way current law is written, recent Supreme Court
rulings have required dangerous criminal immigrants to be released into
our communities,” says Lamar Smith a Texas Republican who is chair of
the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the Tea Party Caucus.
“All too often these criminal immigrants have gone on to commit more
crimes.”
Instead, Smith is proposing that the Department of Homeland Security be
authorized to detain criminal illegal immigrants if they can’t be
deported, especially if the criminal “either is an aggravated felon or
has committed a crime of violence.”
“Just because a criminal immigrant cannot be returned to their home
country does not mean they should be allowed back on our streets,” says
Smith. “If dangerous criminal immigrants cannot be deported, they
should be detained. There is no excuse for placing American lives at
risk.”
There is no excuse at all.
The violations of law and trust by King George III in Parliament pales
in comparison to the loss of trust as a result of the non-enforcement
of immigration laws, especially as it relates to criminal illegal
aliens.
If we can’t get the government to agree that at a minumum we shouldn’t
be releasing criminal illegal aliens back into our communities, I have
no idea why we have a federal government in the first place.
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