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.