WASHINGTON -- The Biden administration is looking to cut more than 25% of the bed capacity at detention facilities for migrants who enter the U.S. illegally in its budget request for the next fiscal year, the latest indication that the government is shifting from incarcerating migrants to using ankle-monitoring devices and other alternatives.
On Friday, the administration announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was ending a contract with a facility that holds migrants and reducing its use of three others. All four detention facilities have been criticized for having poor living conditions.
An official familiar with a draft of the budget plan described details of the funding request ahead of President Joe Biden's release of the plan Monday. According to the draft, the request would be for a total of 25,000 beds at detention facilities for migrants. Congress funded 34,000 beds for the current fiscal year, which runs through September, a number consistent with spending during the Trump administration.
The Biden administration ended the practice of detaining migrant families this year, continuing the practice only for single adults.
Reducing the number of detention beds as a matter of policy, and making good on promises to hold detention facilities to higher standards of care, could be seen as a peace offering to immigration advocates who have been critical of the progress Biden has made in fulfilling his campaign promises on immigration.
"That's a great step forward," Kerri Talbot, deputy director for the Immigration Hub, an advocacy group, said of the upcoming request for 9,000 fewer detention beds. She said the plan to sever ties with one local jail and reduce the government's reliance on three others was good news as well.
The administration said it would stop using beds at the Etowah County jail in Gadsden, Ala. It will also reduce the number of beds it pays for at the Alamance County jail in Graham, N.C.; the Glades County jail in Moore Haven, Fla.; and Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, La. Problems with the facilities, which also hold nonmigrant inmates, include poor medical treatment, lack of access to outdoor areas, bug infestations and other inhumane conditions.
Last year, the Biden administration cut ties with two other facilities, the C. Carlos Carreiro Immigration Detention Center in Dartmouth, Mass., and the Irwin County jail in Ocilla, Ga.
Because of the pandemic, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used only a fraction of its available beds for detention of migrants. There have been public health concerns about spreading the coronavirus in congregate settings, and currently only about 60% of the beds the agency is paying for are in use.
The number of migrants illegally crossing the southwest border has increased sharply during Biden's presidency, and his administration has increasingly turned to alternatives to detention, including ankle monitors, a smartphone application with facial recognition technology and phones that those awaiting court proceedings can use to check in with immigration authorities.
As of Friday, more than 200,000 migrants were equipped with one of these monitoring devices, according to internal data. That is more than double the number of such devices that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was using a year ago. Congress recently gave the agency more than $440 million for alternatives to detention for the current fiscal year, and the agency is testing a home confinement program that is expected to go nationwide this summer.
Republicans have hammered the Biden administration for releasing so many migrants into the country to await deportation proceedings, a practice referred to derogatively as "catch and release." The concern has long been that such migrants will not appear in court and will instead disappear into the country.
Alternatives to detention are not widely embraced by either Republicans or advocates for migrants. For Republicans, detained migrants are much easier to deport than those who are not in detention, regardless of whether they are wearing ankle monitors.
And many liberals see the proliferation of these devices as an enormous surveillance operation.
"We cannot swap physical cages for virtual ones and expect different results from a system that criminalizes immigrants at every turn," Carl Hamad-Lipscombe, executive director of Envision Freedom Fund, a New York-based nonprofit and bail fund. "Immigrants need to be free to be reunited with their families and access the resources they need to live their lives while their immigration cases continue."