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Health & Fitness

What is the Bed Mandate?

In 2006 our US Congress established a little known congressional directive known on Capitol Hill as the “bed mandate”.  This directive requires US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold 34,000 individuals in detention every day (400,000 annually)These people are not necessarily criminals.  These incarcerated individuals may only be guilty of being in the US in undocumented status (a civil offense).

 

Most of the 34,000 are held in county jails, privately run contract facilities and federal facilities.  Can you guess what this Bed Mandate costs US taxpayers every year?  About  $2 billion.  And the privately run contract facilities are making fortunes off of this mandate.

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Immigration detention is generally a civil detention, as opposed to punitive criminal incarceration.  Most of the detainees have not committed any crime.  The detention is to insure that the individuals show up at their scheduled immigration court hearings, for instance.  But opponents argue that this can be accomplished in other ways.  Rather than separate an undocumented father from his US citizen-children, ICE can require the father to check in with them on a monthly basis, or to wear an ankle bracelet.  Monthly check-in is cost free.  An electronic monitoring bracelet costs approximately $7 for a regular unit and about $12 for a cellular unit.  Substantially less than $2 billion per year.

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What if your City Council started telling your local police department how many people it had to keep in jail each night?  What if US Congress mandated the number of criminals who had to fill the jail cells in the US every night?  No other law enforcement agency in the US is subject to a bed mandate. 

 

Several Congressmen have led efforts to repeal the Bed Mandate.  Congressmen Ted Deutch (D-FL) and Bill Foster (D-IL) introduced an amendment to the 2014 Appropriations Bill, but it failed to pass despite support from 189 members of Congress.  In September, 2013, 64 Congressmen sent a letter to President Obama requesting the removal of the bed quota.

 

Isn’t there a lot more that our country could be doing with $2 billion? 

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