As of July 17, President Obama has only mentioned one potential candidate by name to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security; New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly [MORE]. Racist suspect R Kelly has executed NYC's so-called Stop and Frisk policy -a racist, Nazi-like regulation designed to control the physical movements of Blacks & Latinos in total disregard of the increasingly meaningless 4th Amendment. [MORE] As you can see white people just can't get a break in Obama's America.

From [HERE] In the past five years, Homeland Security officials have jailed record numbers of immigrants, driven by a little-known congressional directive known on Capitol Hill as the “bed mandate.”

The policy requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep an average of 34,000 detainees per day in its custody, a quota that has steadily risen since it was established in 2006 by conservative lawmakers who insisted that the agency wasn’t doing enough to deport unlawful immigrants.

But as illegal crossings from Mexico have fallen to near their lowest levels since the early 1970s, ICE has been meeting Congress’s immigration detention goals by reaching deeper into the criminal justice system to vacuum up foreign-born, legal U.S. residents convicted of any crimes that could render them eligible for deportation. The agency also has greatly expanded the number of undocumented immigrants it takes into custody after traffic stops by local police.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials say that they are not needlessly jailing immigrants to meet a quota and that they find plenty of candidates for detention and deportation by targeting criminals who pose a threat to public safety and border security.

But critics of the mandate note that the majority of ICE detainees are not violent offenders. Immigration judges eventually allow many to remain in the United States, but the detainees may spend months in costly federal custody, even when far cheaper alternatives are available, such as ankle bracelets and other forms of electronic monitoring. [the Operating System (os) of White Supremacy Requires a Substantial Number of Non-Whites to be Incarcerated] [more]

With federal spending on immigration detention and deportation reaching $2.8 billion a year, more than doubling since 2006, the mandate has met growing skepticism from budget hawks in both parties, particularly after DHS officials told Congress during the “sequestration” debate in April that the agency could save money by lowering the bed mandate to 31,800 and relying on cheaper alternatives to jails. But House Republicans successfully pushed back, set the mandate at 34,000 detainees and ordered ICE officials to spend nearly $400 million more than they requested.

ICE operations are largely unaffected by the government shutdown, since the agency’s workers are among the federal employees considered essential, DHS officials have said.

Congress’s expanding detention goals have been a boon to the contractors, especially Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America.

The two companies have won hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ICE contracts in recent years while lobbying Congress on immigration enforcement issues.

Former ICE director Julie Myers Wood, who led the agency from 2006 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, said a congressional mandate for ICE to maintain a minimum number of detainees was a reasonable guideline at the outset of her tenure, when the Border Patrol was making more than a million arrests per year.

But today, she said, “it doesn’t make sense.”

Defenders of the bed mandate say it remains a useful tool to compel ICE to devote the maximum amount of resources to catching and deporting illegal migrants and foreign-born legal residents who commit crimes, including dangerous gang members, rapists and other violent felons.

With an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, they argue, there’s still a vast pool of potential deportees for the agency to pursue, or as Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.) put it, “plenty of customers.”

“We know ICE can fill more than 34,000 beds, so why would they use less?” said Culberson, a member of the House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, which ties ICE funding to its compliance with the mandate.[MORE]