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Immigrant detainees could be valuable for Valley in 2010 census
Raymondville city leaders hope to see a significant bump in population when this year’s final Census tally comes in — but not because of a large crop of willing new residents or anyone who will still be in town when the next national count rolls around.
The inmate population of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center — built since the 2000 Census — will likely push this small agricultural community over the 10,000 residents mark this year.
And with an average daily population of 1,000 immigrant inmates from all over the country, the Willacy County Detention Center could expand the city’s total residency by more than 10 percent since the last national count.
But that threshold means more than just replacing the population count on signs marking city limits. It could make Raymondville eligible for millions of dollars more in federal funding and state grants, said Willacy County Judge Aurelio Guerra.
“The more population the better,” he said. “Every little bit helps — including the detention centers.”
How to count the nation’s nearly 2 million residents living behind bars has long posed a challenge for Census officials. On the one hand, inmates are not fully participating members of the communities in which they are imprisoned. But at the same time, they can’t claim to actually be living in their home towns, and they need to be registered somewhere.
Immigration detention centers add another layer of complexity. Unlike state penitentiaries or federal prisons, where inmates can be serving years-long sentences, most residents housed in the nation’s 22 lock-ups for illegal immigrants stay there for only a short period of time before they are sent back to their home countries.
Traditionally, though, the federal government has counted all inmates in their prison cities.
“It’s like what you do with college students,” said David Helfert, legislative director for U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, whose district includes 5,000 beds for immigrant detainees. “If you go to the University of Texas in Austin and go there for four years, you live there. The Census is about residency and where you reside at the time.”
The Census responded this year by allowing states to determine for the first time where they would count their inmate populations. Texas opted to stick with the old formula — a decision could bring a potential boon to cities like Raymondville with a significant detention sector in their economies.
A private state prison and a detention center for inmates accused of federal crimes helped push the city’s population to just over 9,700 in 2000.
The estimated addition of at least 1,000 more inmates from ICE’s new 3,000-capacity facility would bring that total to 10,700, regardless of shifts in actual residents.
This could mean as much as an additional $1.5 million in federal funding for the city, according to calculations based on a 2008 Brookings Institution study that found government money distributed from the census averaged about $1,469 per person.
For Raymondville City Manager Yogi Garcia, this is good news for a municipality that largely missed out on the explosive growth the rest of the Rio Grande Valley saw in the last decade.
“We’ve had slow growth over the last 10 years,” he said. “We’ve experienced anywhere from 3 percent to 5 percent.”
The ICE-managed Port Isabel Service Processing Center outside of Los Fresnos — which houses as many as 850 inmates awaiting possible deportation — will contribute to Cameron County’s total population. But even at full capacity its residents would comprise less than 1 percent of the county’s total population, not enough to make a significant impact.
However, in La Villa — home to the private East Hidalgo Detention Center, which can keep as many as 990 inmates facing federal charges at a time — the incarcerated population could make up as much as 69 percent of the city’s 1,400 population at any given time, according to 2008 Census estimates.
But Helfert dismissed the idea that any community seeks to land prison construction contracts in hopes of increasing their population numbers. Dozens of other factors come into play in attracting government funding.
Other boons — such as new jobs to staff detention centers and the ability to attract other businesses — far outweigh the benefit of future Census-based money, he said.
“To suggest that it’s done for that purpose is beyond inane,” he said. “It’s just one of those population anomalies that can occur in small communities.”
Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 587-9377.
