The Los Angeles Times yesterday reported some staggering statistics about the explosion of the U.S. immigrant detention system in the last 12 months.

The article by Anna Gorman of the Los Angeles Times provides a number of statistics to give us a profile of the current detention population and how much of our tax dollars are going to support it.

• The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget for detention bed space in fiscal year 2007 was $945 million dollars. In 2005, it was $641 million.
• In fiscal year 2007, which ended September 30, the detainee population reached 27,900 nationwide-about 19,700 more than in 2006.
• Two weeks ago, the detention population passed 30,000.
• About 63 percent of immigrant detainees are held in county jails that hold contracts with ICE. They frequently are jailed with the general criminal population, including violent criminals, even though immigration violations are considered civil, not criminal, offenses.
• More than 261,000 people were deported from the United States in 2007, up from about 177,000.
• ICE spent more than $10 million to transfer nearly 19,400 detainees in 2007. Lawyers and family members often cannot locate detainees after these transfers.
• In 2007, ICE spent nearly $100,000 million to treat detainees for physical and mental health issues. Yet at least three immigrants died in ICE custody in the past year, and 66 have died since 2004.

ICE's response: "Given the number of people that go through our custody and given the fact that many of them do not come from a history of exceptional healthcare and health habits, our mortality rate is extremely low," said Gary Mead, assistant director of the immigration agency's Detention and Removal Operations. In other words, ICE believes it is detaining so many people who are too ill to be in jail that the agency should be commended that more haven't died.

Actually, the fact that 1) many of the people ICE detains have health conditions that make detention dangerous, and 2) the majority who are detained have no criminal history nor are a threat to our society, should encourage ICE to seek out more humane (and cost-effective) alternatives to detention.