Jails built to profit from an illegal immigration boom are weighing down the finances of rural counties in Southern states, including Louisiana, as border apprehensions slow and the federal government orders the release of more migrants.
Bloomberg reports that in Texas—the heart of a jail-building boom over the past decade—nine of 21 counties that created agencies to issue about $1.3 billion in municipal bonds to build privately run correctional facilities largely for migrants have defaulted on their debt. A dozen other facilities from Florida to Louisiana to Arizona, many that housed immigrants, have also defaulted, according to figures from Municipal Market Analytics, a bond-research firm based in Concord, Massachusetts.
The slowdown in border detentions is putting a fiscal strain on counties that rushed to build jails in anticipation that a two-decade boom in immigrant inmates would continue. Municipalities that banked on those facilities for revenue and jobs are desperate to keep them afloat as a glut of beds goes empty and walls gather dust.
“My fear has always been that this would happen,” says Joel Rodriguez Jr., judge of La Salle County, Texas, about 67 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, who is overseeing the fate of a distressed detention center. “When this facility was sold to the county, they sold it as a money-making facility that was going to be a great economic boon.”
Today the 566-bed facility, called the La Salle County Regional Detention Facility, sits almost empty behind thick coils of razor ribbon in tiny Encinal, whose 579 residents barely outnumber prison beds. Another border detention center was destroyed in a riot by prisoners after cost-cutting efforts led to deplorable conditions. Another, on the banks of the Rio Grande River, is slated to close next month after too few inmates walked through the doors to keep up with big debt payments.
Last year, Texas counties had $709 million in scheduled debt service for so-called lease-purchase obligations, most of which are for jail facilities, up from $273 million in 2000, according to figures from the Texas Bond Review Board.
The increased debt grew right before migration patterns and immigration policy began to shift. Last year, there were 487,000 apprehensions, about the same level as in 1973, compared with a peak of nearly 1.7 million in 2000, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. At the same time, the trend of locking up migrants has eased.
