Passaic County (NJ) Jail ends the housing of immigrant detainees
Karen Keller
Herald News
E-mail: kellerk@northjersey.com
The Passaic County Jail will no longer house federal immigration
detainees, marking the end of several years of controversy about
the jail's treatment of those detainees. It also will mark the end
of a revenue source that brought millions of federal dollars into
the county.
The jail's current 110 detainees are leaving the jail at the rate
of 10 to 20 a week, sheriff's spokesman Bill Maer confirmed Wednesday.
In an e-mail, Maer said Sheriff Jerry Speziale's decision to end
the program was based mainly on concern about the amount of effort
spent to manage the detainee population.
The move comes as the Department of Homeland Security prepares to
release a report in February on conditions and treatment of detainees.
A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which
oversees the detainees, said Wednesday that the Sheriff's Department
made the call.
"They did recently notify us that they want to withdraw from
the [Inter-Governmental Service Agreement], so we stopped sending
detainees," said Mike Gilhooley, the ICE spokesman. Speziale
would not comment.
The detainees, most of whom are being held for violations of civil
immigration laws, will be shipped to other sites in New Jersey,
New York or Pennsylvania, Gilhooley said. The Passaic jail served
as one of the major immigration detention facilities in the wake
of 9/11, with its population climbing to 386 from 40, according
to Ron Fava, the sheriff at the time. The jail eventually held almost
500 detainees.
Along with the increase in detainees came protests and hunger strikes
about crowding, poor conditions and mistreatment. In December 2001,
seven detainees staged a hunger strike. In March 2002, Amnesty International
issued a report saying detainees held in jails, including Passaic,
had been abused. The same month, U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, now the
governor-elect, toured the jail and wrote a commentary, condemning
the prolonged imprisonment of detainees as violating the basic right
of due process.
As recently as Dec. 13, immigrant advocates charged that jail guards
beat an Egyptian detainee - a charge the Sheriff's Department denied.
More than 90 detainees signed a petition Dec. 17, asking that Homeland
Security end its contract with Passaic because of "very poor
and health risk conditions at this jail."
Heung Wah Wong, an immigration detainee who passed through Passaic
County Jail but is no longer there, detailed what life was like
there in a memo sent to Homeland Security. There was one urinal
for 58 men, Wong said, and grease floating on top of the milk served
to the detainees. "We are humans that made a mistake along
one of life's long roads," Wong wrote. "We are seen as
the waste of America, but we are not!"
Haitian-born Jean Alexander, 37, who spent six months at Passaic
County Jail before being released Nov. 23, said conditions were
worse for an immigrant. "They start trouble with us,"
Alexander said of the guards.
After National Public Radio reported in November 2004 that dogs
were being used on immigration detainees in Passaic County Jail,
the federal government forbade that practice and launched an investigation.
But the audit ran into trouble in July, when Speziale ejected the
federal auditors, saying they behaved arrogantly.
The auditors were allowed to finish their work after Speziale met
with Homeland Security officials in Washington, D.C., in August.
The immigration detainees brought in hefty federal payments to the
Sheriff's Department that ranged from an estimated $12 million in
2003 to an expected $6.9 million this year. To offset that loss,
the Sheriff's Department jail is accepting prisoners from the state
and the U.S. Marshals Service, Maer said.
The Marshals Service pays $77 a day per prisoner, the same amount
as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while state prisoners are
less lucrative, at $62 a day per prisoner.
Passaic has the highest number of Marshals Service prisoners of
any county jail in the state, with 375 prisoners currently, said
Jim Tlousis, the U.S. Marshal for New Jersey.