Detained Illegal Aliens Counted in Census

Your tax dollars at work. Counting people who shouldn't even be in this country in the census. Ironically enough, by the time final numbers are sorted out chances are these illegals won't even be in the country.

What kind of idiocy is this?

Paulo Sergio Alfaro-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant being held at a detention center in Washington state, had no idea that the federal government would count him in the census.

No one gave him a census form. No one told him his information would be culled from the center's records.

But counted he was, along with other illegal immigrants facing deportation in detention centers across the country - about 30,000 people on any given day, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.

By the time the census delivers the total tallies to the state and federal government, most of the immigrants will be long gone. But because the population snapshot determines the allocation of federal dollars, those in custody could help bring money to the towns, cities and counties in Texas, Arizona, Washington and Georgia where the country's biggest and newest facilities are located.

"I think the irony, if there's any irony, is that the locality is what's going to benefit, because you have a detention center in a particular city where people have been brought from different parts of the region, and that community will benefit," said Arturo Vargas, executive director of National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, an organization that has pushed Latinos to participate in the census.

This census brings a twist, though. For the first time, states have the option of counting people in detention centers and prisons as residents of their last address before they're detained, worrying some local lawmakers who say cities and counties that host detention centers could lose money.

"Detention centers and prisons should probably count where they are located, that's where resources would be required," Rep. Sanford D. Bishop, D-Georgia wrote in a May letter to the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the census. Bishop represents Stewart County, Georgia, population 4,600, where the nation's largest detention center housed a total of 14,000 people between April 2007 and March 2008.