For a fee, a Texas-based company is helping dozens of Georgia counties secure federal reimbursements for holding illegal immigrants behind bars.
Justice Benefits Inc. is doing the work in exchange for a fee based on a percentage of the funding each county gets from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.
The company contracts with more than 500 counties nationwide, including 26 in Georgia, said Mike Moore, Justice Benefits’ senior vice president of government affairs.
DeKalb County, which is among Justice Benefits' clients, received the highest funding from the program of any county in Georgia during the last fiscal year at $246,793.
DeKalb’s contract with Justice Benefits shows it must pay the company a fee equal to 15 percent of the federal funding it receives from the reimbursement program. Justice Benefits helps the counties identify which inmates are eligible for the program and then helps them put their applications together.
“I have nothing but good to say about JBI,” said Melissa Manrow, a special projects coordinator in the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office. “I think they are very open and responsible. It is to their benefit to maximize our take because the more we get, the more they get.”
Meanwhile, Fulton County is the most populous county in Georgia, yet it has historically received less federal funding for incarcerating illegal immigrants than much smaller communities in the state, public records show.
Last fiscal year, for example, Fulton received $7,939 from the federal reimbursement program. Fulton’s population in 2010 was 920,581, census records show. In contrast, Henry County -- population 203,922 -- received $58,826. And Gwinnett County -- population 805,321 -- got $190,963.
Tracy Flanagan, a spokeswoman for the Fulton Sheriff’s Office, said her county’s jail doesn’t have “large numbers of noncitizens” who meet the criteria for the funding. When Fulton applied for last fiscal year’s funding, it reported it had held 68 noncitizens, according to documents obtained under Georgia's Open Records Act. The county’s inmate population totaled 2,351 this week.
Flanagan said her office recently considered hiring a private company to help it apply for the money, but the county decided to continue doing the work in-house. Justice Benefits recently sent Fulton a contract proposal, Moore said.
“We definitely feel like Fulton is underclaiming and they could get increased amounts of funding under the SCAAP program,” Moore said.
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