On Monday, the White House presented their proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2013 which cuts reimbursements to states for the costs of imprisoning criminal aliens by nearly two-thirds.
Obama has proposed slashing the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) from $240 million to only $70 million.
California would be particularly hard-hit under Obama’s plan.
The Press-Enterprise has reported that in Fiscal Year 2011, “Riverside and San Bernardino counties received almost $2 million through the program.”
California, which has been inundated with illegal aliens ordinarily receives over a third of total SCAAP funding.
The Department of Justice issued the following statement on the proposed cut: “The proposed reduction to SCAAP will allow DOJ to maintain adequate funding levels for some of its highest priority programs.”
However, the deep cuts would place already fiscally strapped states such as California in an even tighter bind.
Jeffrey Callison, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said: “It would be unfortunate if the federal government spent less money supporting the cost of these inmates. But at this point, of course, it’s a proposed budget item. There’s a long way to go between it being a proposed line item in a budget and it being enacted.”
In 2010, California spent around $1 billion on their illegal alien inmate population. The state received $88.1 million in federal reimbursements…this year they will receive even less ($32.8 million).
In February 2010, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Mark McCorkle told the Los Angeles Times: “The federal government reimburses us literally pennies on the dollar what it costs us.”
California houses approximately 19,000 illegal aliens in its state prisons...http://www.examiner.com/immigration-reform-in-national/the-average-illegal-alien-california-has-been-arrested-seven-times
Also in 2010, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca wrote to the House Appropriations Committee to request more funds.
Baca explained: “Because SCAAP reimburses previously incurred undocumented criminal alien incarceration costs, every dollar of incarceration costs not reimbursed by SCAAP adds a dollar to state and local budget shortfalls that must be offset by reductions in other essential services.”
Of course, California is the hardly the only state going broke housing illegal alien criminals.
The Denver Post recently reported that foreign nationals are the fastest growing demographic of Colorado’s prison population. Executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, Tom Clements, says that the number of ICE issued detainers throughout the Colorado prison system “have more than doubled in 10 years from 680 to 1,500.”
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers says that housing illegal alien inmates cost the state $58 million in 2008 alone.
Though we are told by the federal government that immigration is solely a federal issue, it would seem that the states are bearing the lion’s share of the costs associated with the issue.
In 2008, the feds reimbursed Colorado a rather paltry $3.3 million, or 6 percent of the state’s expenses. However, that amount has been steadily dropping since Obama took office, even as costs continue to increase.
In Spring 2011, the Nevada state Department of Corrections asked the state legislature for just under $1 million to get them through the rest of the fiscal year.
In April, Jeff Muhlenkamp, deputy director of the Corrections Department, told the Senate Finance Committee that is costs about $22,000 a year to house each illegal alien inmate, while the federal government only provides about $2,200-$3,300 per inmate.
There are approximately 1,000 illegal alien inmates in the Nevada’s prison system. Most of them have been convicted of serious offenses and cannot be released.
Obama tells us that illegal immigration is a federal matter and therefore states such as Arizona cannot enact their own laws banning illegal aliens from state. Of course, the federal government is now suing that state over a law which is basically a mirror image of federal immigration law.
However, while Obama claims that only the federal government can enforce immigration laws, he refuses to defend our borders in any meaningful way (In Feb. 2011, Richard Stana, the Government Accountability Office’s director of homeland security and justice issues, testified before a U.S. House Subcommittee that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had just determined that the Border Patrol has control over only 129 miles of the 1,994-mile-long U.S./Mexico border.).
The GAO also estimates that as of 2009, there were about 350,000 criminal aliens being held in U.S. prisons, with “the majority from Mexico.” Each inmate costs approximately $30,000 to house, for a total of $11 billion annually.
Obama will not defend this nation against illegal aliens, nor will he allow the states to defend themselves, nor will he take financial responsibility for those illegal aliens when they victimize Americans.
So, who exactly should be responsible for housing those illegal aliens whom the states are not allowed to deport, when they commit crimes against the residents of those states?
In the spirit of bi-partisanship, it should be noted that President George W. Bush tried to end the reimbursement program altogether.
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