An Oregon county’s commitment to detain undocumented immigrants at the federal government’s request has left little room in its overcrowded jail cells for people involved in more serious offenses. In the last month, Sheriff Dan Stanton said his jails have released individuals involved in the unlawful use of a weapon, assault, robbery, and a car chase in order to jail immigrants for 48 hours so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can investigate their status.

However, Stanton says the county can no longer afford to release criminals in order to hold alleged undocumented immigrants (his new policy would exclude anyone accused of felonies and misdemeanor violent crimes). According to KATU News, Stanton argued the current system puts “undue burden on the county:”

“I’m releasing people who are committing burglaries. I’m releasing people that are stealing vehicles. I keep releasing people that are low level drug offenders and I’ve got to put a stop to it.“

According to Detention Watch Network, 67 percent of the 33,330 immigrants detained in 2011 were held in hundreds of county and city prisons.

A handful of cities, including New York City and Los Angeles, already limit their cooperation with federal immigration officials on requests to detain immigrants with no serious criminal offense. Budget cuts appear to be forcing many to rethink immigrant detentions, considering their staggering cost at $119 per person per day.

According to a report in the New York Times on newly released federal data, roughly 300 immigrants are currently being held in solitary confinement at the 50 largest facilities throughout the United States immigration detention system — the largest such system of any in the world. Many of these detainees are being held on civil as opposed to criminal charges, and thus are “not supposed to be punished; they are simply confined to ensure that they appear for administrative hearings.”

On any given day, about 300 immigrants are held in solitary confinement at the 50 largest detention facilities that make up the sprawling patchwork of holding centers nationwide overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, according to new federal data.

Nearly half are isolated for 15 days or more, the point at which psychiatric experts say they are at risk for severe mental harm, with about 35 detainees kept for more than 75 days.

While the records do not indicate why immigrants were put in solitary, an adviser who helped the immigration agency review the numbers estimated that two-thirds of the cases involved disciplinary infractions like breaking rules, talking back to guards or getting into fights. Immigrants were also regularly isolated because they were viewed as a threat to other detainees or personnel or for protective purposes when the immigrant was gay or mentally ill.

Of those immigrants being held in solitary confinement, 11 percent where mentally ill, 46 percent were held for 15 days or more, 21 percent were held 45 days or more, and 11 percent were held 75 days or more.

Solitary confinement generally involves holding prisoners for 23 hours a day in a small, windowless cell with a steel door. The one allowed hour of recreation usually takes place in similarly small enclosures that are indoors or lined with fencing — “similar to an indoor dog kennel,” as the Times put it. Access to phones, lawyers, outside communication, or even showers is often strictly limited. Solitary confinement is widely considered a psychologically damaging and dangerous form of confinement, and earlier this year the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced it will be carrying out a study of the practice. One federal court has already determined that solitary confinement of the mentally ill, at least, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The overall population of immigrants in detention has exploded by 85 percent since 2005, and now stands at roughly 400,000. At the same time, there are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement throughout then United States at a given moment — again, the largest number of any country in the world.

During the 2012 fiscal year, the federal government spent more on immigration enforcement — $18 billion — than on every other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a new report from the Migration Policy Institute. The spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection dwarfs the combined $14.4 billion spent on the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Secret Service.

The U.S. has spent more than $187 billion on immigration enforcement since President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 — which first made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers along with strengthening U.S. border security. Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. now spends 15 times as much on immigration enforcement as it did in the mid-1980s. And the number of deportations and immigration-related prosecutions has also jumped along with the increased spending:

The Migration Policy Institute found that ICE and CBP also refer more cases to prosecution than those other agencies combined, and the immigration agencies also held more individuals in fiscal year 2011 than the federal Bureau of Prisons. [...]

At the same time, deportations have exploded. The U.S. deported about 30,000 people in the 1990 fiscal year; in the 2012 fiscal year, it removed a record 409,894. A majority of those people were deported without an order from an immigration judge, instead using DHS’ discretion, the Migration Policy Institute found.

President Obama has taken steps to try to limit deportations that separate families living in the U.S., but as the MPI report highlights, officials are not using the discretionary policies available. In addition to a new rule announced last week that allows undocumented immigrants who can prove that time away from a parent, spouse or child will cause “extreme hardship” to return to the United States while they apply for legal status, the deferred action measure announced last summer has already succeeded in temporarily blocking deportation of more than 4,500 immigrants, with some 150,000 other applications pending.

But the high costs and increasing number of deportations continue to show exactly why Congress needs to address comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. With comprehensive reform that provides a path to citizenship, the U.S. would see a cumulative $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product — the largest measure of economic growth — over 10 years in addition to $4.5 billion to $5.4 billion in additional net tax revenue over just three years if the 11 million undocumented immigrants were legalized.

Over two years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have deported more than 200,000 undocumented immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines. That number accounts for 23 percent of all deportations between July 1, 2010, and Sept. 31, 2012. And the number of parents who are deported has remained roughly the same since Congress required ICE to track the number of parental deportations, despite “prosecutorial discretion” guidelines from 2011 to prioritize the deportations of people with serious criminal convictions over mothers and fathers:

The guidelines, released on June 17, 2011, in a memo from ICE director John Morton, instructed ICE agents to focus deportation efforts on people with serious criminal convictions, those picked up crossing the border into the U.S., and those who had previously been deported from the country.

The memo also ordered agents making deportation decisions to weigh “the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships,” and “whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child, or parent.”

In answer to questions about the parental deportation data, ICE officials told Colorlines.com the continued pace of deportations does not reflect a failure to implement prosecutorial discretion, because most deported parents have other factors weighing against them.

“Evaluation of this data in the past has repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of these individuals have significant criminal and/or immigration histories placing them within ICE’s enforcement priorities,” wrote agency spokesperson Gillian Christensen in an emailed statement, “therefore making them ineligible for an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

“We are in a crisis situation in which we need to start taking action immediately to prevent these needless and often-times permanent separations of American children from their families,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) told Colorlines. Roybal-Allard introduced a bill last year to protect the parental rights of parents who have been detained and deported. According to a 2011 report by the Applied Research Center, at least 5,100 U.S. citizen children are stuck in the foster care after a parent was deported. Within five years, researchers estimate that number could triple to 15,000 at the current rate of deportations.