Background
In 1988, in response to Congressional initiatives, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) developed and implemented a program to initiate deportation proceedings for criminal aliens as expeditiously as possible after the date of conviction. This program, the Institutional Removal Program (IRP), is the responsibility of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but fully understanding the potential volume of workload presented a challenge for the organization.
Project Summary
To address this challenge, ICE contracted with Fentress to conduct a workload analysis study of the IRP by determining the foreign-born population of all 50 state departments of correction and the 50 largest local jail facilities across the country, and identify the number of illegal immigrants serving criminal sentences that need to be deported to enable ICE to effectively plan for the anticipated workload volume. This project required detailed knowledge of illegal alien trends, knowledge of federal detention and incarceration practices, particularly for state and local jail facilities, and extensive experience with data collection and analysis techniques using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
Results
Fentress collected over 8.1 million data records, including 1,766,341 records from foreign-born inmates from state and local jail facilities. To collect this data, Fentress interviewed state and local jail facility representatives, conducted research to identify independent data sources and government data repositories, and identified electronic sources of information. Fentress also developed several IT tools to collect and analyze the data, including a comprehensive project database. Fentress analyzed the data using rigorous statistical methodologies and random sampling techniques to verify data validity and identify trends. Following the analysis, Fentress statisticians and analysts developed an IRP workload model that was used to determine future workload trends for each of the jail facilities and related staffing required by ICE to support the workload. Finally, Fentress produced a comprehensive report documenting the steps in the study and detailing the data collection, analysis, and results of the IRP workload model. The report provided detailed information on each of the facilities that were included in the study, a summary of the current illegal alien population, and projected trends for each facility. Following the completion of the major portion of the IRP study, Fentress provided two related studies for ICE, including: (1) an analysis of the frequency with which individuals initially booked into county jails on pre-trial status are ultimately sentenced to state departments of correction to determine whether available data could be used to identify inmates likely to follow this progress, and (2) a comparison of the estimated historical workload collected for the IRP study with historical data received by ICE for its State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) to identify discrepancies and support the validity of either set of data.
