Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The increase in the number of apprehensions driven by the intensification of immigration enforcement and the criminalization of illegal entry has led to an ever-growing number of immigrant detainees waiting for their day in court.[1] In FY2018, the average daily population (ADP) of immigrants held by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) in authorized detention facilities was approximately 44,872, an all-time high.[2] At the same time, there has been a steady increase in the immigration court backlog, with immigrants waiting on average 670 days until their cases are heard in court.[3] Where to hold individuals convicted criminally and civilly for immigration-related issues has become a serious logistic concern (Wagner and Sawyer, 2018). ICE has contracted with local public and private jails and correctional facilities to serve as temporary detention centers and, at one point, it relied on U.S. federal prisons to house detainees. In 2016, three quarters of the average immigrant detainee population was held in privately owned facilities, and ICE currently spends more than $2 billion a year on immigrant detention centers operated through private facilities (Burnett 2017, Luan 2018). As the immigration detention system continues to expand, it is important to examine the relationship between immigration policy and the U.S. correctional system.

Using jail-level data from the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ) conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2000 to 2016, as well a unique dataset of interior immigration enforcement, we exploit the temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement and the adoption of sanctuary policies throughout the United States to investigate the extent to which immigration policy has influenced:

• Incarceration rates in U.S. correctional facilities, with a special focus on Hispanic, female, and juvenile populations,
• The expansion of private correctional facilities, and
• Confinement conditions, including facility overcrowding, understaffing, duration of confinement, and availability of special recovery and health programs.

Immigrant detention has moved to the forefront of the immigration debate raising issues, such as the treatment of unauthorized migrants and their children while they are detained in ICE facilities, the role of public and private prisons in the detention process or the rising cost of immigrant detention (Luan 2018, Saldivar and Price 2015, American Civil Liberties Union 2014). However, no study has empirically examined the impact of immigration enforcement policies on the U.S. correctional system. As immigrant detention becomes more entrenched in the U.S. correctional system, it becomes critical to understand the connection between intensified immigration enforcement, immigrant detention, and the progression of U.S. public and private jails and prisons. For example, we know little about the capacity of U.S. public and private correctional facilities to accommodate the growing number of immigrant detainees resulting from a growing number of apprehensions.

[1] See Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2016, Table 33 found at https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/enforcement-actions.

[2] See https://immigrantjustice.org/ice-detention-facilities-november-2017 and https://immigrantjustice.org/sites/default/files/content-type/page/documents/2018-03/2017-6-22_ILRC_FOIA_to_ICE_FINAL.pdf

[3] See http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/468/