Audit details waste by ICE

Inefficient deportation flights cost extra $41M

Immigration and Customs Enforcement may have wasted as much as $41 million over the past few years by mismanaging how it transports undocumented immigrants by air, a federal watchdog said Friday.

Among ICE’s questionable practices:

Flying chartered planes to Central America half-empty.

Inexplicably shuttling detainees between U.S. cities as many as six times in five weeks.

Failing to record such basic information as why detainees were being deported, whether they had criminal records or even whether they were men or women. For instance, ICE records for gender included entries such as “none” and “30,” the audit found.

The report was prepared by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. ICE’s Air Operations Division, or ICE Air, is based in Mesa.

The Office of Inspector General

found cases in which ICE Air inexplicably flew detainees repeatedly between the same cities.

For example, in July 2013, one detainee was flown from an unidentified city to Denver, four days later to El Paso, two days later to Phoenix, back to Denver three weeks later and then to El Paso a week after that before finally being flown to Mexico. Another detainee in 2013 was flown to Seattle, El Paso, Phoenix, back to Seattle, back to Phoenix and then to Guatemala City.

Inspectors called the potential lost savings just an estimate, because “ICE Air does not capture and analyze the reasons detainees miss flights,” nor does it collect “complete and accurate data essential to support operational decisions,” the report said.

ICE officials said the agency agrees with many of the criticisms raised by the report and is taking steps to address them. But Gillian Christensen, ICE’s press secretary, said the agency “strongly disagrees with the report’s use of empty seats on flights as a measure of efficiency.”

Christensen said delaying flights to fill them up could actually cost the agency more money, and that a variety of legal and safety considerations sometimes leave ICE no alternatives.

ICE spends an average of $122 a day for a detention bed for an adult, and more than $300 a day for family beds.

The Office of Inspector General’s report said from October 2010 through March of last year, ICE chartered 299 flights in which more than 60 percent of the seats were empty. On 3,578 flights, or roughly two-thirds of ICE charters, at least 20 percent of the seats were empty.

The ICE Air Operations Division, based in Mesa, transports detainees by charter aircraft within the United States and to Central and South America and the Caribbean.

ICE pays, on average, $8,410 per flight-hour to contract for eight jets, each of which can carry up to135 passengers. Less often, ICE also contracts for charter flights to Europe, Asia or Africa.

Some factors are outside of ICE’s control, inspectors noted. For example, El Salvador will accept no more than 120 detainees per flight.

Over the three and a half years ending in March 2014, ICE Air spent about $598 million to transport more than 930,000 detainees, more than half of those on domestic flights.

In the cases where detainees were flown to multiple cities, inspectors said they couldn’t figure out whether the transfers were necessary, because ICE doesn’t collect or analyze data on how often or why detainees are transferred.

ICE Air officials told inspectors that detainees may be transferred if travel documents are missing or for medical reasons. Inspectors said that in 69 percent of cases in which detainees were scheduled to fly but didn’t travel, ICE didn’t record why they missed the flight, making it hard to figure out and fix potential problems.

Part of ICE’s problem in keeping track of its flights is that the agency’s managers had not “developed a data management plan, assessed staffing and training needs” or put in place adequate formal policies, inspectors found.

“Since the audit was conducted,” ICE’s Christensen said, “ICE Air has hired an additional 58 personnel. New and current personnel have been trained ... on flight scheduling, flight tracking and performing quality checks.”

Last summer, ICE moved and consolidated its air operations from Kansas City, Mo., to Mesa, according to a letter to the Office of Inspector General from Radha Sekar, ICE’s executive associate director for management and administration.

Sekar said ICE is drafting formal policies for its air operations and that it expects to complete them by the end of this year. New training is to be completed by the end of July 2016, and a new data-management plan is to be in place by November 2016. The data-management plan is currently being drafted with extensive input from experts, ICE Air operational staff and senior leadership, Sekar said.