High Cost of Immigration Enforcement in Colorado
By Chris Stiffler
Imagine that on your way to work tomorrow, you are arrested by law enforcement and detained by Unites States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). You don’t know how many days the detention will last. What happens at your job? Who watches your children? How do you put a dollar figure on the time missed from work or the time away from your family?
Thousands of Colorado immigrants each year face these uncertainties as the result of a Colorado law, known as SB90, which requires local peace officers and agencies to report anyone arrested for a criminal offense, who they reasonably believe to be undocumented, to ICE
In an earlier report, CFI found that as a result of this 2006 law, thousands of immigrants were being arrested, held and detained in county jails for long periods of time for low-level offenses, costing Colorado taxpayers and communities millions of dollars each year in jail and detention expenses.
The costs of local immigration enforcement, however, go well beyond the police work hours, administrative booking fees, and incarceration costs. When we detain immigrants for low-level offenses that typically would not result in any jail time, we remove an employee from an employer, a parent and caregiver from a child, and a taxpayer and consumer from the community. When people are detained, they miss work during the days incarcerated (missed days worked) and also face indirect consequences (e.g., losing their job because of the missed week of work).
According to the dataset, 85 percent of those detained on an ICE notification missed at least one day of work. We calculated that $91.75 on average is lost in wages each day that an individual is held in Colorado facilities on an ICE notification. With over 24,200 ICE notifications a year in Colorado averaging 4.2 days in jail, this means that $9.5 million is lost in spending from the Colorado economy and $855,000 in lost tax revenue due to the lost employment that results directly from the time spent holding Colorado immigrants – often times for low-level infractions – for ICE
Check out the full report available here as well as the personal stories of individuals experiencing ICE holds.
