Immigration Agency Weighs Less-Restrictive Detention Centers - washingtonpost.com

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By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The United States will review the procedures under which it detains about 380,000 illegal immigrants a year, exploring the use of converted hotels and nursing homes as it seeks to transform a prison-based system into one tiered according to the risk posed by individual detainees, Obama administration officials said Tuesday.

Detailing an overhaul announced in August, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and John T. Morton, assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the measures are intended to make the much-criticized, $2.6 billion-a-year immigration detention system safer and more efficient without adding to its costs.

The changes come as advocates for immigrants pressure President Obama to improve detention standards and legalize millions of illegal immigrants. At the same time, Obama has said tough enforcement policies are essential to winning approval from Congress for any deal to grant legal status.

"We accepted that we were going to continue to have -- and increase, potentially -- the number of detainees," Napolitano said. Among the review's goals, she said, is improving federal oversight of more than 300 local jails, state prisons and private facilities.

By next October, ICE will rank detainees on the basis of flight risk and public danger, set new requirements for detention facilities based on those risk levels and issue bids for two new-model detention centers, Napolitano said.

Morton will meet with contractors this month to explore converting residential facilities to house non-criminal and nonviolent detainees, such as asylum-seekers, which could be cheaper to operate and less restrictive for occupants.

On Sept. 1, ICE housed about 31,075 illegal immigrants. About half of them were felons, of whom 11 percent had committed violent crimes.

Morton said ICE will implement a medical classification system within six months to identify detainees with special health needs.

The agency also vowed to expedite efforts to provide an online detainee-locator system for lawyers, relatives and others, and to provide Congress this fall with a nationwide plan for less restrictive facilities.

In an interview after the news conference, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the focus on detention misguided, saying that about half of ICE detainees have no criminal record and await deportation for administrative violations.

"It would be more cost-effective to track these individuals with an electronic monitoring device than to build brand-new facilities to detain them," Schumer said.

Amnesty International, Human Rights First and the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project released statements saying that they were encouraged but that fundamental reforms were still needed, such as guaranteeing the right to a bond hearing.

Julie Myers Wood, who led ICE from 2006 to 2008, warned that less-restrictive detention facilities can be expensive and, because some illegal immigrants may flee, would not have the same deterrent value.

"I certainly want to be supportive of ICE, but it seems a little unrealistic," Wood said. ICE detention "is becoming the new drop house," she said, referring to the temporary quarters where some smugglers drop off their customers before they disperse into the country, and "that's what smugglers are going to plan on if you set up facilities that are less secure."