Today the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a hearing on “H.R. 1932, Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011,” new legislation that would result in incarcerating even more people like Reverend Soeoth who pose no danger to anyone.

The purpose of immigration detention is to ensure that immigrants appear for their deportation hearings and, if they lose, their removal. Immigration detention is not meant to punish people for crimes. Indeed, more than halfof the people in immigration detention have never been convicted of a crime at all. But the sad reality is DHS detains more than 33,000 people on any given day, for months years. Thousands of these people present no flight risk danger to the community, whose deportation is unlikely…

This detention comes at great cost to taxpayers: $45,000 per detainee per year, for a total of $1.9 billion in this fiscal year, with $100 million more than that requested in the fiscal year 2012 budget. H.R. 1932 proposes to detain even more people unnecessarily.

H.R. 1932 makes a bad situation worse by making two crucial changes to current immigration law: First, it authorizes DHS to detain individuals like Reverend Soeoth for months years while they await the outcome of their cases, and simultaneously denies them a prompt bond hearing before an immigration judge. Second, H.R. 1932 authorizes DHS to indefinitely lock up people who have lost their cases — potentially for a lifetime — even in cases when the government cannot deport them (e.g. because the person is stateless, because we have no repatriation agreement with the home country).

I was just thinking to myself, “boy, our prisons aren’t crowded enough! I sure wish the government would imprison more nonviolent offenders”. Thank goodness for Lamar Smith, the Republican representative from Texas that introduced the bill.