You'd think if a sheriff's going to fire off an angry response to being reminded of an AG directive, then at least she'd get her facts straight. Guadagno is accusing AG Ann Milgram of politicizing the issue of Guadagno's 287g application to ICE, which would deputize Monmouth corrections officers to ask immigration status - a rich pot calling the kettle black. And goes on this paranoid rant that Milgram only sent letters to the GOP strongholders of Monmouth, her county and Morristown, in the county where Christie is from, leaving out Hudson, which already has ICE trained officers in the jail. She's just plain wrong, which she could have known by looking at the articles in the APP or Star Ledger:
Milgram sent letters Friday and Tuesday to officials in three counties saying they should show no bias when upholding the law...
Monmouth County and Morristown, along with the Hudson County Department of Corrections, are among 79 departments nationwide that have been accepted into the program, known as 287(g), which was overhauled to allay fears it would be used to target or harass immigrant groups.
The third letter was sent to Corrections Director Oscar Aviles of the Hudson County jail.
Guadagno's accusation that Milgram is 'misinformed' and 'hate-mongering' is based on Guadagno's statement:
"Under our program, we simply ensure that if you are detained in our jail and you are an illegal alien, you will be identified, processed by federal authorities and deported if appropriate," Guadagno said.
I've discussed here why this is only going to lead to civil rights abuses and not net any criminals who aren't already covered under the AG's directive. But Ann Milgram was probably just covering all bases, seeing as the Monmouth sheriff's department does have a 'law enforcement' division. While Guadagno hasn't applied for a 'task force', do we know that she can't have some of her law enforcement officers trained by ICE? From the sheriff's department website:
"The Sheriff's Office law enforcement division consists of a warrants division and fugitive task force, a criminal investigations bureau, a court security unit, a civil process unit, a canine unit and an id bureau."
Milgram's letter just looked to be a generic reminder to both Morristown, that is asking for a task force and Monmouth that, according to Guadagno's statements, wants to use 287g for corrections officers.
I, for one, am pleased to see the following in Ann Milgram's letter:
In addition, any law enforcement officer that exercises authority under Section 287g must submit monthly reports to the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice, as required by Directive 2007-3, that document the name, address, gender, date of birth, country of birth, race and ethnicity of the individual queried; the location of the encounter; the criminal offense that formed the basis for the arrest; the outcome of the inquiry; and whether the individual was taken into custody or otherwise detained based upon immigration status.
This is how you track instances of racial profiling and is exactly what is missing, according to the ACLU, from the new 'Memo of Agreement' put out by ICE that is supposed to address the issues of racial profiling.
On another topic, in the sheriff's department statements on the cost of housing federal detainees, either she or her spokeswoman is misleading, if not outright wrong, just throwing facts around in a way that it's hard to tell whether the contract is saving the county money or not. In a August 20th APP OpEd, Guadagno tries to answer the allegation that she is losing the county money, after her spokeswoman said the county receives $105/night for federal inmates and it costs $134/night to house them. The reasoning is pretty convoluted.
If we canceled the per-diem program, there would be fewer in each mandated housing area but, under state law, each area would still remain open. We would have empty beds with the same overhead with no offsetting federal income. Eliminating the program as the editorial urges would end a revenue stream of approximately 10 times the amount saved. Thus, eliminating the per-diem program would plainly result in added cost to the already overtaxed people of this county.
I don't find that so plain, especially compared to her spokeswoman's numbers. So, it looks like those numbers are inaccurate or don't factor everything in.
I have to laugh that she thinks the APP is calling to cut the contract for federal and ICE detainees in the Monmouth County jail. They're advocating that if you take her spokeswoman's numbers on face value.
In light of the county's budget troubles, the Board of Freeholders should do what it neglected to do during the budget hearings: Insist that Sheriff Kim Guadagno ... justify the expense of housing federal prisoners. If she can't, at least one wing of the jail should be shut down, with the staff reduced accordingly.
Guadagno apparently gave no hint at the time that the federal prisoners were costing the county money.
I would want the ICE contract cut because ICE doesn't enforce its standards for jail conditions, even when deaths have occurred, as in Monmouth and Middlesex, and because it doesn't make sense to detain people with only administrative violations. Most of the 1,000 rented jail beds in NJ are a waste of federal dollars. |
