Kadner: Detention center talk angers Crete residents

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Crete Mayor Michael Einhorn

Updated: February 12, 2012 8:11AM

Crete Mayor Michael Einhorn told me he wasn’t hiding Monday night from an angry crowd demanding answers about a proposed detention center for illegal immigrants that the village is considering.

“We had just adjourned our village board meeting when they began coming in,” Einhorn said Tuesday. “That was just the timing.”

But Einhorn and village trustees refused to come out of a back room in the village hall to meet with the 60 or so people who chanted, “No detention! No detention! No detention center!”

The crowd had walked two blocks to the village hall after listening for more than an hour to speakers at an informational meeting set up by local residents at the Crete Township Hall.

At the township hall, a standing-room-only crowd of about 130 people heard Fred Tsao, a lawyer for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, describe how the U.S. government has been deporting about 400,000 people a year (“twice the population of Aurora”) since 2007.

“These are people who have homes, families, businesses and have been here in some cases for decades,” Tsao said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has about 250 facilities across the country with 33,500 beds for illegals awaiting deportation. ICE also pays many counties for space in their jails, where the illegal immigrants have been treated like criminals, Tsao said,

The federal government apparently has decided to transition to a system that some people deem more humane — one that includes detention centers being built and operated by private companies funded by the federal government.

ICE has indicated it plans to finance such a center in Crete, and Mayor Einhorn has been discussing the project with ICE officials and a private corporation.

Bernie Kopera, of Orland Park, told the audience that while private corporations claim they can operate detention facilities at a lower cost than the government, that means they pay security guards less, demand less training and try to increase profits by overlooking the medical problems of detainees.

Jill Hornick, who lives in the Balmoral Heights subdivision of Crete Township, said detention facilities with high walls topped by barbed wire bring down property values in surrounding communities.

She said Crete could also incur a cost for providing back-up police services to the detention center and emergency services should a fire break out.

Sister JoAnn Persch, of the Sisters of Mercy, said she visits inmates at the McHenry County Jail and told of husbands who were deported, leaving wives and children behind.

“These are people who had jobs and provided for their families, and now these people have to be supported by your tax dollars,” she said, adding that in some cases the wife and children are U.S. citizens.

Charles Bayo, who came to the U.S. from the Belgian Congo in 2006, said he owned a business when sheriff’s officers suddenly arrived one day and took him into custody. He said he was forced to eat rotten fruit and food crawling with worms at times to survive while in detention.

On Tuesday, Einhorn told me that he would be willing to answer questions from residents about the detention center, which he said is still in “the talking stage.”

He said he has met twice with ICE officials, and at first they asked him, “How do you think people will receive this?”

“You can never predict how people will react,” Einhorn said he told them.

“People opposed a McDonald’s because they were worried about wrappers winding up on their lawns,” the mayor said. “They opposed St. James Manor (a nursing home in Crete) when it was first proposed.”

Einhorn suggested that many of the people opposing the detention center are opposed to deporting illegal immigrants.

“They ought to take that up with their congressmen because that’s a federal policy decision,” he said.

He said the property being considered for the center consists of 70 vacant acres about a mile south of Burville Road near the end of Hartman Drive.

ICE would pay Crete to operate the detention center, and the village would hire a private contractor to run it. So the village would make a profit off of that and could tax the property and count the detainees as residents, qualifying for state tax money, Einhorn said.

“But we’re still in the talking stages, and before anything is done we would hold informational hearings for the public,” he said.

In tomorrow’s column, I plan to write more about this subject.