The U.S. spends $1 billion a year jailing foreign criminals. Here’s who they are
by Stephen Dinan · The Washington TimesThe federal government spends $1 billion a year to keep foreign citizens in its prisons, according to a study released Monday that put a price tag on at least part of immigration’s costs and delivered a probing look at who the criminals are.
Mexicans predominated among the noncitizens, with immigrants from northern Central America, Colombia and the Dominican Republic rounding out the top of the list.
Noncitizens accounted for about 15% of murderers behind bars — about the same percentage as their share of the overall federal prison population.
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But foreigners were overrepresented among those behind bars for drug offenses, fraud and money laundering, according to the Government Accountability Office.
They were underrepresented in robberies, burglaries, arsons and firearms convictions.
Of those held by the feds from 2017 to 2024, about 10% ended up behind bars more than once, including 400 who were re-incarcerated three more times after their initial release, the GAO said.
That rate is likely lower than the general population, due in part to the fact that the majority of noncitizens are deported after their release from federal prison.
All told, the federal government spent $8 billion to incarcerate noncitizens in the BOP from 2016 to 2023. The cost was more than a billion dollars at the start of that period, dipped in the middle, then rose — even as the total number of people dropped.
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The GAO said one likely explanation was the Biden administration’s decision to curtail the use of private prisons, which had been employed in particular for low-security inmates.
“We noted that this time period coincided with the end of [Federal Bureau of Prisons’] contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities, which were its lowest-cost facility type,” the GAO said.
It said the government paid as much as 35% less for a bed in a private prison.
Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project, said that’s a ramification of the large number of immigrants — now at record levels — who are in the U.S.
“If we have mass immigration, we’re also going to have mass incarceration. So it’s one of the costs of mass immigration,” Ms. Jenks said.
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Experts have long debated the overall level of illegal behavior among the immigrant population as a whole and the illegal immigrant population in particular.
The GAO data doesn’t speak directly to that.
But it did say that the Department of Homeland Security reviewed about 62,700 foreign criminals when they were taken into BOP custody and found that about two-thirds already had deportation orders or were in deportation proceedings.
The GAO said 35 noncitizens at the time of their incarceration between 2017 and 2024 went on to naturalize as U.S. citizens.
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The GAO said 11 of those had fraud and bribery convictions and eight had drug-related offenses. Two had weapons offenses, and one had an aggravated assault conviction yet was still granted citizenship.
In addition to the BOP costs, the Department of Justice spends roughly $200 million more per year in reimbursements to state and local governments to cover some of the costs for holding illegal immigrants in their prisons and jails.
The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program is supposed to compensate state and local governments for some of the costs of holding people who presumably wouldn’t be here if the federal government had prevented illegal immigration.
Reimbursement covers between a quarter and a third of the cost of holding an illegal immigrant.
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One difference between the BOP and the states is that three-quarters of those who passed through federal prisons had immigration crimes on their records. There generally aren’t any similar immigration crimes at the state level.
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Stephen Dinan
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