Congress's Illegal-Immigration Detention Quota Costs $2 Billion a Year

Noemi Romero, 21, was arrested on a charge of criminal impersonation while working at a Phoenix grocery store in January. Because she was in the country illegally, she’d used someone else’s name to get the job. Romero came to the U.S. at age 3 and says she had hoped to earn enough to pay the $465 application fee for amnesty under a 2012 Obama administration program for people brought to the U.S. as children.

She ended up in a 1,596-bed immigrant detention center in Eloy, Ariz., run by Corrections Corp. of America under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security. Romero spent almost two months in the prison while ICE initiated deportation proceedings against her. She has been released and says the case against her has been dropped.