30 percent of federal prisoners are immigrants, DOJ/DHS reports

Immigrants accounted for more than 30 percent of the federal prison population and nearly all of them are confirmed or suspected illegal immigrants, the government said in a new report Tuesday.

The government said it had 57,820 migrants in its prisons as of Dec. 31, Homeland Security and the Justice Department said in the joint report.

Nearly 20,000 other immigrants were held in pretrial detention by the U.S. Marshals Service, most of them in contracted facilities, costing the government $134 million for just three months. That works out to nearly $90 a day for each person in those contract facilities.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said there shouldn’t be any illegal immigrants in prisons, because they shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place.

“Every crime committed by an illegal alien is, by definition, a crime that should have been prevented,” he said in releasing the report. “It is outrageous that tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year because of the drugs and violence brought over our borders illegally and that taxpayers have been forced, year after year, to pay millions of dollars to incarcerate tens of thousands of illegal aliens.”

President Trump last year ordered the Justice and Homeland Security departments to produce a regular count of immigrants in prisons to give taxpayers a sense for one of the costs the government bears.