Most single parents and their children who are caught at the border in Southern Arizona will be taken to Phoenix, where immigration officials will decide if they are released with a tracking ankle bracelet, a local agency said.
Since last week, immigration officials told volunteers working with families that they will no longer be dropped off in Tucson, said Galen Hunt, an Americorps VISTA in-house volunteer with Catholic Community Services. This week they’ve only received two families.
The local group owns the house where mostly women and children arrive. Volunteers help make travel arrangements to their final destination, where their immigration cases continue.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis with a priority for detention of serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety,” agency officials said in a written statement.
“Those who are not subject to mandatory detention and don’t pose a threat to the community may be placed on some form of supervision as part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program,” it said.
The Alternatives to Detention program places low-risk people under different forms of supervision or electronic monitoring rather than in detention, the agency said. The idea is to increase compliance with release conditions, so people show up to court and leave the country when they are supposed to.
ICE has been releasing families, mostly women with their children, in places such as Tucson since their numbers started to rise last year. So far, nearly 17,000 have been caught — 2,000 of them in Arizona.
Because family units can’t be detained with a general population and the government lacked bed space, families were dropped off at local bus stations with instructions to report to an immigration officer at their final destination, usually a place where they had relatives.
The shift in policy from releasing to tracking the Central American women and children as they travel across the country was first reported by the Associated Press in December 2014.
The AP and other media reported that ICE launched a program to give GPS devices to some parents caught crossing illegally with their children in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
In September, federal government officials told a group of immigrant advocates that about 70 percent of family units didn’t report back to ICE after they were released at the border, the AP reported.
And The Monitor, a newspaper in McAllen, Texas, reported this week that since May 13, people have been arriving at a local church wearing the monitoring bracelets. For about a week in December church volunteers saw immigrants donning similar devices, the newspaper reported.
The reporting program costs about $3.50 a day after a $19.50 enrollment fee, according to media reports, while ICE has said the average daily rate at family residential centers is $343.
The fiscal year 2016 ICE budget includes $122.5 million for the Alternatives to Detention program.
ICE considers criminal history, humanitarian concerns and community ties when deciding if a person can be monitored outside of detention, the agency said.
Meanwhile local volunteers are operating under a wait-and-see mode, Hunt said.
Immigration officials told them they should still get families on the weekends, he said, which would make it worthwhile for his group to continue to operate.
If not, they can reconvene and figure out how else they can help, he said, which may include offering support to groups in Phoenix.
