>>1898716 - lb
Starting to dig on the Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service (lirs.org)
Seems pretty legit, they provide facts in their documents, and suggest ways to keep the costs down (just looking at 3-4 docs so far).
For example:
Alternatives to Detention (ATD):
History and Recommendations
The use of detention for immigration enforcement has grown dramatically in recent years. In Fiscal Year
(FY) 2013, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
detained an all-time high number of 441,000 individuals.
1 Current immigration detention costs
taxpayers approximately $123.54 per person per day for adults and $342.73 per person per day for
families.
2 For context, in FY 1994 the federal government detained fewer than 82,000 migrants.3
Immigration detention is a civil authority, despite the use of penal institutions. The sole purpose of immigration detention is to ensure compliance with immigration court proceedings and judicial orders.
For many migrants in ICE custody, detention is not legally required. In these cases, ICE has the discretion to decide whether a person should be detained, released, or placed into an alternative to detention (ATD) program. Historically, ICE has not always exercised this discretion, resulting in the needless detention of hundreds of thousands of people, and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Recently, ICE developed and deployed a risk assessment tool to make informed detention decisions based on individual circumstances. However, because current appropriations language requires ICE to maintain
34,000 daily detention beds, individualized detention decisions may be overridden by the requirement to
meet a detention quota.
ATDs are a proven and highly cost-effective approach for ensuring that individuals appear at immigration proceedings. There are a range of options that ICE can utilize to encourage compliance. Some options, like release on recognizance or bond, carry little to no cost; many detained individuals pose no risk of
flight or danger to the community and could be released on bond or their own recognizance, costing the government $0 for supervision and monitoring. More intense forms of supervision and monitoring, such as enrollment in an ATD program carry slightly higher costs. Current ATDs range in cost from pennies
to $7 per person per day4, depending on the type of monitoring involved. In FY 2016, ICE estimates that the average cost per ATD participant will be $6.33.
5 Compared to the billions spent each year on
detention operations, ATDs represent a smarter, cheaper, and more humane way to ensure compliance …
https://www.lirs.org/assets/2474/lirs-backgrounder-on-alternatives-to-detention-3-25-15.pdf
“But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was;
and when he saw him, he took pity on him.”
(Luke 10:33)