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Jail processed 4,300 illegal immigrants in one year
Fairfax County processed approximately 4,300 illegal aliens through its jail last fiscal year, according to Fairfax County Sheriff Stan Barry.
In a Sept. 10 letter from Barry to John Jones, executive director of the Virginia Sheriffs Association, Barry said the figure represents approximately 16 percent of the jail's total population for the same time period.
Members of the Virginia State Crime Commission heard that the number was over 4,800, according to Del. Dave Albo (R-Springfield), who chairs the commission. However, that higher number includes people being held on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“In other words, they were not Fairfax criminals but were only being held there,” Albo said.
According to Albo, it costs an average of $23,000 per year to house a state prison inmate.
Albo is currently preparing state legislation based on proposed recommendations from the commission's Illegal Immigration Task Force, which includes the construction of a 1,000-bed state facility for the detention of “criminal illegal immigrants.”
“It is not a jail,” Albo said emphatically. “It is a detention facility. The people who will be there will not be violent criminals, they will be criminals who received a sentence of less than a year or perhaps low-level felons who were not sent to prison.”
Another task force recommendation is to amend Virginia law to include “illegal immigrants” to the list of people for whom there is a presumption against bail. Another recommendation is to require the Virginia Department of Corrections to verify the validity of inmates' Social Security numbers in its records and to omit from its records those that are discovered to be false.
In Barry's letter to Jones, he states that the Fairfax County jail management system is approximately 23 years old and does not currently capture an inmate's place of birth or citizenship.
“In order to try to give you an estimate of how many illegal immigrants we housed during FY2007, we reviewed our Automatic Fingerprint Identification System and our mug shot system, which does gather information on illegal immigrants,” the letter states.
“He's using an old system from the '80s,” Albo said of Barry's accounting of illegal alien detainees. “Obviously he needs to upgrade, but it turns out that Fairfax County is doing exactly what they should be doing, they are just using an outmoded reporting system.”
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