The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General reported this week that the department is continuing to ignore a law that allows it to transfer foreigners in federal prisons back to their home countries.
The inspector general report said failing to use the program to its fullest extent is costing taxpayers money for the continued cost of incarcerating these foreign nationals, and also makes it more expensive for the U.S. to deport them later if they are illegal immigrants.
“For foreign inmates who are subject to deportation following the completion of their federal prison sentence, transfer avoids the cost to the Department of Homeland Security of undertaking a deportation proceeding and of housing the foreign nationals during those proceedings,” it said.
“For those foreign inmates who may not be deportable, transfer ensures that the inmates do not remain in this country at the conclusion of their prison sentence.”
The inspector general has studied the International Prisoner Transfer Program before, and released a study in 2011 that said nearly 33,000 foreign nationals eligible for transfer were being held in federal prisons as of fiscal year 2005.
Since then, the number of eligible foreign nationals in these prisons has increased by nearly a third, to almost 43,000 by fiscal year 2013.
The program is voluntary, but prisoners have been increasingly requesting to be transferred. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2013, prisoner requests have surged 72 percent, to more than 24,000 per year.
But despite these huge increases, the Justice Department has transferred less than 1 percent of these eligible prisoners from 2005 to 2013.
In the last few years, Justice Department decisions to transfer these prisoners overseas has actually fallen. Between 2005 and 2010, the department was averaging 238 transfers per year, but from 2011 and 2013, that number fell to an average of 227 per year.
“As a result, we remain concerned that the Department is not fully utilizing the transfer authority Congress gave it to return eligible and suitable foreign national inmates to their home countries,” the report said.
The inspector general report acknowledged that some hurdles to moving more prisoners overseas include the voluntary nature of the program, and the fact that some participating countries can impose roadblocks to these transfers. Still, it recommended that the Justice Department conduct a review to examine why the program is not being used.
