Folly in Prince William
By whacking illegal immigrants, the county wounds itself.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

LAST SUMMER, as Prince William County prepared its half-baked, ill-tempered and predictably unworkable crackdown on illegal immigrants, we called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a straightforward question: If the county began detaining hundreds of illegal immigrants after routine traffic violations and other minor infractions, would ICE be able to retrieve and deport them promptly?

The answer was direct: not likely. The federal agency has a finite number of beds (31,000) for detainees nationwide, and those must accommodate a crushing caseload of would-be deportees: asylum seekers; fugitives awaiting removal; border crossers; ex-cons; those who have committed violent crimes; and others. The federal priority, ICE officials explained, is people who are threats to national security and public safety, not the undocumented landscapers, construction workers and restaurant dishwashers whose presence so irks some Prince William politicians.

How surprising, then, to see Prince William officials moaning this week that county jails are overflowing with illegal immigrant detainees whom ICE has not been able to pick up promptly. The superintendent of the county jails, Col. Peter A. Meletis, complained to The Post's Nick Miroff that ICE told him "they lack bed space to put people in." The result is a three-ring circus of utterly foreseeable but unfortunate consequences and costs that county officials had every opportunity to avoid but chose not to.

As a result of the stepped-up detentions, county jails that were already badly crowded are now bursting at the seams. In February, the county's two main jails, whose capacity is 402 inmates, held an average of 664 a day; an additional 275 inmates were sent to facilities elsewhere in Virginia at a monthly cost to the county of some $220,000. To compound the irrationality, it is native-born inmates, often with roots in the community, who are being shipped to far corners of the state, while the immigrants are kept at Prince William's jails, waiting up to four weeks for ICE to get around to retrieving them.

At a time of intense budgetary pressure in Prince William, the crackdown on illegal immigrants may force the county to spend some $3 million a year on transportation, processing and other expenses to deal with jail overcrowding. And that doesn't include the millions of dollars in new costs that county police would incur to enforce the crackdown. That would be a painful financial wound for the county -- and one that would be entirely self-inflicted.