COLUMNISTS

Lowry: Hudson takes ICE money without a blink

Bruce Lowry
Hudson County Jail

 

How much is an immigrant’s life worth?

In Hudson County, it’s worth about $120 per day.

Or, if you’re talking about money made from warehousing people gathered up under Donald Trump’s Gestapo-like, anti-immigrant tactics, potentially $35 million a year from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE.

That’s a lot of money for any county government, so who cares where it comes from, right? New Jersey officeholders have never been that particular about where they get their revenue, as long as the spigot stays on.

In Hudson County, the freeholder board made certain the spigot stayed on regarding housing immigration detainees. As Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado reported, the freeholders, by a 5-2 vote, agreed to approve a new contract with the feds that will pay the county $120 per detainee per day, a $10 increase from the $110 it had paid previously.

Heck, given the feeding frenzy that is Trump’s bent toward running down every single undocumented immigrant in the land – be they young, old, orphaned or infirm -- I don’t know why the Hudson freeholders didn’t hold out for twice that much money. 

Right now, the jail in Kearny houses roughly 800 immigration detainees awaiting hearings on their deportation orders. As Matt Katz reported for WNYC news, these are not people charged with local crimes; they are people in limbo. Many of the folks housed at the Hudson facility were picked up by federal officials in New York City.

Hudson County had been getting about $1.8 million a month, or about $21 million a year, to house immigrants at the jail; if all goes “well,” that is, if the Trump administration keeps up its intense pursuit of what some letter writers to The Record like to call “illegals,” the county could take in as much as $35 million from ICE.

Anthony Vainieri, chairman of the freeholder board, explained the freeholders’ logic in re-upping for its cooperative agreement with ICE:

“ICE detainees have to go somewhere. We can house them here, and it’s better for the families … so they don’t have to travel far … It’s not like if we don’t take them it’s going to go away. It’s not going to go away. There is no reason why we shouldn’t approve a contract just because people are against ICE.”

No, it’s not going to go away, especially as long as public officials, Democrat and Republican, keep bending over backward to help the Trump administration carry out its unsavory business. Keep helping ICE with what they know to be inhumane, overly aggressive actions against immigrants – actions where families are ripped part, and where small children are stranded God knows where.

Two Hudson County freeholders, William O’Dea and Joel Torres, showed some semblance of a conscience and voted against the new ICE agreement, saying they wanted more time to study it. According to a report from NJ.com, Torres had asked the board to “carry over” the vote into the next month’s meeting. The rest of the freeholders, though, couldn’t wait to start cashing in on other people’s misery.

Hudson County is just one of four facilities in New Jersey that currently houses immigration detainees for the U.S. government. The Bergen County and Essex County jails also house detainees.

The Hudson County facility, though, has had its own notoriety. The Record has reported on the jail’s troubles in providing adequate health care to its inmates, and last June, Carlos Mejia-Bonilla, a 44-year-old immigration detainee from El Salvador, died after being rushed from the jail to Jersey City Medical Center. His family claims the jail ignored his concerns about his health.

What it gets down to is this: housing immigration detainees is a messy, unsavory business. It always has been.

The fact that we have made it such a lucrative, money-making business as well should be enough to give all of us pause. Of course, we also know that everything related to Trump is bound to have some cost-and-reward angle to it, regardless of who gets hurt in the process.

As for those elected officials who have OK’d the warehousing of these immigrants in their own backyard because, well, “somebody has to do it,” and, oh, by the way, “our county will get handsomely compensated for our troubles,” I hope they sleep well knowing they are looking out for taxpayers and so obviously serving the public good.

Bruce Lowry is the editorial page editor for The Record. Email: lowryb@northjersey.com

Hudson County Freeholder William O'Dea, Vice Chairperson of Freeholder Board at July 12, 2018 meeting.