A sheriff in Alabama has pocketed $1.5 million in federal funds earmarked for food for ICE detainees. You can read all the shocking details of this apparently legal scam in this investigative report published a few days ago by Al.com
This story caught our eyes here in Westchester County, NY, because we have about 22-25 immigrants who were rounded up by ICE (some more than a year ago) and now housed in the hellish Etowah County Detention Center, a thousand miles from their homes.
It is far cheaper to house them in Alabama ($45 per diem 2016) than here in the New York area. You can read about the dismal conditions at this public prison in a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as an earlier report from 2016. You can read how the detainees, held often for more than a year, are fed disgusting food and denied recreation, visitation and access to lawyers.
But now we learn that even this outrageously low per diem is not being used on the detainees at Etowah. Instead the sheriff and the county get to keep anything they don’t spend.
What an incentive!
Here are the highlights of the al.com investigation:
‘Towering high above the streets of Gadsden, the Etowah County Detention Center is an outsized presence in the small northeast Alabama town.
As one of the largest buildings downtown, the facility seems too big to house only the county’s thieves, drug dealers and other accused and convicted criminals.
Indeed, the jail serves an additional purpose.
The detention center has a federal contract to incarcerate hundreds of undocumented immigrants who face lengthy legal battles over their immigration status and alleged crimes.
Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin runs that jail. And he makes a lot of money doing it.
Earlier this year, he acknowledged that he keeps money budgeted for jail food that goes unspent, saying in a press conference that he kept more than $750,000 between January 2015 and December 2017.
But records show he had already pocketed more than twice that amount.
An AL.com review of hundreds of pages of county and sheriff’s office records has revealed for the first time the extent to which Entrekin and the county’s general fund benefited from the federal immigrant-detention contract.
For example, beginning in October 2011, the surplus from feeding federal inmates over the next three years was more than $3 million – half of which Entrekin pocketed and half of which went to the county’s general fund, according to the documents and interviews with county officials.’
The good news is Sheriff Entrekin lost his recent bid for reelection (in a primary after it was disclosed he had spent ICE food money on a $740,000 beach house) and may in fact be under investigation for some wrong doing. (As noted in the caption of the photo accompanying this diary, the beach house shown is just a random beach house — not his specific one. )
The bad news is that he leaves office rich and, unless pressure is put on our federal officials, there is no reason to think that conditions at the jail will dramatically improve.
This latest immorality is an assault on our American values. We cannot let it continue. Rep. Eliot Engel on Thursday called upon the Department of Homeland Security to move the Westchester County detainees back near their homes so they can get humane treatment while their cases are litigated. (Engel is a Democrat whose district includes parts of Westchester. He is now chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.)
Words are a great first step. We need to keep the pressure on all our elected officials to make this happen. We must call upon the new Congress – the Democrats in the House and yes, U.S. Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama – to change this now.
Please tell your senators and representatives to support policies that require that all detainees — there are about 300 undocumented immigrants at Etowah and others elsewhere — be “housed” near their homes (where many have lived for decades!) where they can see their families and meet with lawyers. This is not just a New York issue nor an Alabama issue. It is a national issue. It is a human issue.
The bottom line from the Southern Poverty Law Center report:
“Our investigation revealed that the operators of the six Southern detention centers we investigated are unable to ensure safe and humane conditions for civil immigrant detainees. This failure has had tragic human consequences.”
“The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost”
“The fact is, detained immigrants are seen by many as commodities rather than as people with legal rights. They already face an uphill legal battle. Unlike individuals in criminal proceedings, immigrants in removal proceedings are considered to be in civil proceedings and are not guaranteed a lawyer at government expense. The vast majority of detained immigrants in the South must face immigration courts alone, proceeding pro se (without a lawyer) at a rate much higher than other detainees nationwide. In light of these factors, it shouldn’t be a surprise that detained immigrants in the South face some of the worst odds for immigration relief.”