C4 detention from C1
across the spectrum agree: With- out additional detention space, the program cannot function. ICE has detained fewer than one- quarter of the immigrants identi- fied by Secure Communities, a range of suspected criminals fac- ing charges as varied as misde- meanors and murder. “The Obama administration
can’t expect to increase enforce- ment measures without increas- ing detention capacity,” said Jes- sica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immi- gration Studies.
Thankful for new jobs Enter: the new Farmville cen-
ter, an expansive, single-story building that fills a 30-acre clear- ing in the woods on the outskirts of the town, which is about 170 miles southwest of the District. Richmond-based Immigration Centers of America built the de- tention center in the last days of the Bush administration, as the number of immigrants in federal custody hit an all-time high. ICA began work on it even before the government committed to send- ing detainees there. The town was, and still is, largely united in support of the detention center, which is expected to bring 300 jobs to the economically battered
S
KLMNO
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010 Immigrant detention center would be mid-Atlantic area’s largest
town of 7,500. “They have to send these peo- ple somewhere,” said Farmville Mayor Sydnor C. Newman Jr. “Thank God they chose Farm- ville.” The town, which has lost manufacturing jobs in recent years, stands to receive about $213,000 a year in revenue from a $1-per-detainee daily fee the company will pay. Before construction was com-
pleted, the project hit a snag: The death of an immigrant de- tainee at the nearby Piedmont Regional Jail stirred talk of ICE negligence, only two years after an internal investigation found that the jail’s medical unit did not meet minimum ICE stan- dards.
Edward Gordon, the jail’s medical director and a Farmville council member, still pushed for the new ICE facility.
Another potential holdup was
uncertainty about the new Oba- ma administration’s immigra- tion policy. In his first days in of- fice, President Obama closed one of the nation’s largest immigrant detention centers, in Texas. Would there be a need for a mid- Atlantic hub for ICE operations? The administration’s large-
scale expansion of Secure Com- munities soon answered that question. Since October 2008, the program has checked the le-
U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT The facility could grow to hold 1,000 prisoners. It will bring 300 jobs to Farmville, Va.
gal status of 262,930 immigrants who had been charged with crimes in 95 jurisdictions. In Virginia, most of those im-
migrants have been detained in local jails, not ICE facilities. The Farmville center is part of an ef- fort to reduce dependence on outside facilities that house both
Official’s personal debt enters public forum of D.C. politics
brown from C1
ously close to a 12 percent debt ceiling that Brown voted to ad- here to. “It’s poor judgment for him to
not have cleaned that situation up,” Orange said Thursday on WRC-TV. “Is this the person you want to send to Wall Street? Is this the person you want to send to the Congress?”
Brown, who leads the council’s economic development commit- tee and describes his profession- al record as “stellar,” has sought to portray his debts as everyday household expenses, the “new spending that you take on as a growing family.” But a review of public records and interviews with Brown indicate that he is emblematic of a time when bal- looning real estate values and easy credit were taken as license to finance personal luxuries. “We continued to spend, and we overspent,” said Brown, add- ing that his family is now on a strict budget. “We were spending like we had no kids, and we had two [kids and] one income,” he said. “I’ve accepted full responsi- bility, and we’ve made arrange- ments to make sure it gets taken care of.”
Real estate boom
In 2006, like many homeown- ers across the nation, the Browns found themselves with a home that was valued at much more than they ever imagined. Brown and his wife, Marcia, had purchased the brick home, on a hill across from a wooded gully, for $313,000 in late 2002. They got a 30-year, fixed-rate loan from Industrial Bank and within a year borrowed against the equity. According to real es- tate records, the couple refi- nanced in 2004, signing a $319,260 adjustable-rate note from Washington Mutual, adding soon after a $92,000 home equity line of credit from SunTrust. In 2006, at the height of the
market, the Browns refinanced again, borrowing $598,000 from McLean-based First Savings Mortgage Corp. At the time, Brown was drawing a $92,530 salary as a council member; his wife had left her job to raise their two children, born in 2001 and 2003, and would not return to work until 2007. “We made a sac- rifice for that, and I don’t regret that sacrifice,” said Brown, who now is paid $122,530 a year and stands to make $190,000 if elect- ed chairman. In October 2006, less than four months after closing on the refi- nance, Brown completed an ap- plication for a Visa card through the Department of Commerce Federal Credit Union. (He was an executive in the department’s Business Liaison Office during the Clinton administration.) On the application, Brown wrote that he had an outstanding mort- gage balance of $506,000 on a home he estimated to be worth $850,000. At the time, the city’s assessment — which tends to lag behind market trends — valued the home at $357,930. Chuck Riley, a real estate agent
active in the Hillcrest market and a neighbor of Brown’s, estimates the home’s current market value at no more than $420,000. The balance on the mortgage, Brown
citizens and illegal immigrants, Helwig said.
Prioritizing cases The new facility is also meant
to relieve a tension between en- forcement and detention that be- gan in 2007, when Prince Wil- liam County gave local police the
ability to enforce immigration laws. Like Secure Communities, that
program produced a surge in the identification of illegal immi- grants — “more than ICE could handle,” said Tom Guterbock, a University of Virginia professor who led a county-endorsed study
of the initiative. After about a year, the crush of detainees in Prince William “forced ICE to say that they would only take the most serious offenders,” Guter- bock said.
Although the agency main- tains that “Secure Communities is not restricted by bed space,” as ICE spokesman Cori Bassett said, the recent spike in criminal de- tainees forced it to announce that the program will allocate limited bed space first to violent offenders. “They say they’re prioritizing
dangerous criminals, but we con- tinue to see people suspected of minor crimes who are caught in their net,” said Gonzalez, the CA- SA of Maryland lawyer. “It doesn’t matter if they’re convict- ed or not.” In Farmville, Pamela R. De- Camp, managing attorney for the Virginia Legal Aid Society, is waiting for a deluge of new cli- ents. The federal government, which provides funding to Legal Aid, won’t let DeCamp represent illegal immigrants. “But these people have fami- lies, and many of them have hus- bands, wives or children who are U.S. citizens,” she said. “If they move to Farmville to be close to their loved one, there’s a good chance they’ll need our help.”
sieffk@washpost.com
Montgomery in dispute over payments centro from C1
house a few blocks away that the group had planned to buy. And he questioned the outlay for com- puters, which he said should not have been part of the renovation payments. In an interview, he said it had been a mistake for his staff to pay for the computers. “The work . . . combined with your recent relocation . . . lead us to conclude that funds were used to remodel office space for admin- istrative space rather than the creation or expansion of a bilin- gual daycare facility,” Dise wrote in the letter to Centro Familia and Torres.
XIAOMEI CHEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
The Brown home in the Hillcrest area of Southeast Washington is estimated to have a market value of no more than $420,000.
said, far exceeds that figure and the line of credit is still active. Brown says the home equity was used for household expenses and to help family members through financial difficulties. “You step up and provide,” he said. Told of Brown’s financial deci- sions, Riley said it was a familiar story. “It doesn’t sound [like] anything out of whack — not for the time frame,” he said. As Brown’s debt
grew, he continued to project an image of affluence. Until earli- er this year, Brown drove a 2000 Mer- cedes-Benz E350 for which he paid $19,000 — one of three cars in the household. “I like cars. There’s no ques- tion that Kwame likes cars,” he said, reciting a list of used Mercedes-Benzes he has driven in years past. “I try to get the best value I can for the dollar I spend on my car.”
Kwame R. Brown says he has curbed his spending.
ries, middle income,” said Marvin T. Storey, a 40-year club member and a former board member. The city’s commercial marinas, most- ly on the Washington Channel, can cost the owner of a boat of Bullet Proof’s size several thou- sand dollars annually in mem- bership and slip fees, but the nonprofit District Yacht Club charges $150 a month or less. The club requires members to con- tribute sweat equity, helping with repairs and maintenance, and Brown did his time before he docked his first boat, a 28-foot 2004 Bay- liner. He later traded up to the Chris-Craft. “I was persistent because I believed that D.C. residents should have an op- portunity to have a boat and be a part of a club,” Brown said. But Storey said he
But Brown said he is cutting back. He sold the Benz earlier this year, he said, leaving him with a 2003 Lincoln Navigator SUV and a 1999 Ford F-250 pick- up with custom wheels — both vehicles owned free and clear. But he regularly drives a 2008 Es- calade ESV leased for $1,380 a month— including insurance for any driver — by his campaign, which raised more than $200,000 in its first two months, according to a June campaign fi- nance report. The Escalade is covered in a
“skin” — a full-body sign touting Brown’s candidacy. “You can buy billboards or you can find an- other way to really turn heads,” he said.
Part of the club In 2005, shortly after winning
election to the council, Brown started thinking about getting a boat. “It was a great time to buy a boat,” Brown said. “I assumed that I could buy it, enjoy it with my two kids, finally show them the water, show them something I didn’t get exposed to as a kid.” He set his sights on the District
Yacht Club, tucked into the Ana- costia’s “Boathouse Row” — not exactly the province of the blaz- er-wearing Thurston-and-Lovey set. “Most of the people here are everyday people — average sala-
has not seen much of Brown. “He’s gotten so wrapped up in politics, he really hasn’t had time for boating,” he said. Brown said he regrets his nau- tical foray. He would like to list the boat for sale at $50,000, but he has had trouble finding a bro- ker open to that price. Anything less, he said, will exacerbate his financial troubles. “I can’t afford to lose $30,000 on a purchase,” he said. Frank Gary, a broker with
Walczak Yacht Brokerage Service in Annapolis and a past presi- dent of the Yacht Brokers Associ- ation of America, said Brown’s boat is of a type that makes it tough to sell these days. “They think it’s glamorous, and they think it’s in their price range. But they don’t understand the money it takes to keep it on the water,” Gary said. “There’s a lot of com- petition out there. We’ve gone through severe financial times.” Brown purchased the boat in 2007 from a struggling business- man in Woodbridge. He paid $50,000 — well below the boat’s $73,000-plus market price — with the hope that he might sell it someday and make a tidy prof- it.
The boat came with a sign on the deck: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
debonism@washpost.com
Staff writers Ann E. Marimow and Nikita Stewart contributed to this report.
An immediate reply was re- quested, but none came. County real estate officials ap- parently did not pursue the mat- ter until a few weeks ago, when they again tried to contact Centro Familia. This time, they reached Torres. She told them that she had not re- ceived Dise’s letter and reiterated that last week in an e-mail re- sponding to questions from The Washington Post.
But by then, it was too late. Cen-
tro Familia was out of business in everything but name. Its training program for home day-care pro- viders had been handed off to an- other nonprofit, and the bilingual day care at the church was shut- ting down.
Monitoring faulted When the county paid Centro
Familia, which has received at least $2.3million in county funds since 2005, the group was already under well-publicized scrutiny by the county Health and Human Services Department, the inde- pendent inspector general, and the FBI. The Health and Human Services Department determined in November that Centro Familia wrongly billed the county last year for $85,000, an amount recently reduced to $60,000 and still un- der negotiation.
Torres said in an e-mail last week that if anything was wrong with the payments for the Whea- ton contract, the county is at fault. She said the contract with the county does not specify where the work had to be done and that the attachment she submitted, saying the work would be done at the Amherst Avenue building, was not binding.
She provided e-mails that show her organization had received ap- provals early last year from a staff member in the county’s General Services Department to spend some of the money on furniture and computers. Torres also said by e-mail that the staffer had also ap- proved the change in location “through various e-mails and tele- phone conversations.” Dise, however, said his office has no record that the county ap- proved a change in location. “If Mr. Dise concludes that the
explanation offered for the pur- chase of this equipment and the cost of renovation did not satisfy their regulations and guidelines, then the responsibility for that failure lies squarely on Montgom- ery County’s personnel,” Torres said by e-mail. “This strategy of continuously
accusing Centro Familia of mis- conduct in its invoicing practices must cease,” she wrote. “Mont- gomery must take responsibility for its internal procurement and contract monitoring failures, and stop deflecting all blame to a small nonprofit organization.” She noted that Centro Familia had come in under budget, billing the county $51,000 when the con- tract allowed for $75,000. Centro Familia’s money prob- lems have been a source of con- cern for elected officials, who de- cided recently to cut Centro Fami- lia off from county largesse by ending a $450,000 contract for the day-care program during countywide budget cuts. The organization’s woes came at a high cost for Centro Familia,
COURTLAND MILLOY D.C. police chief checks race, gender at the door milloy from C1
Congress had put only white men in charge of law enforcement.) “The high approval rating is not for me, it’s for the department,” Lanier said while we dined at Ray’s the Steaks, her favorite restaurant, in Northeast. “Nobody likes the chief when the officers aren’t doing their jobs.” Of course, not everybody likes the chief even when the department is on the case. Some worry, for instance, that Lanier is turning the police force into something akin to a high-tech, military covert-ops unit, lacking only a Predator drone, so far. “Look here,” she said, taking
her iPad and touching a special Google Earth icon on the screen. An aerial view of the Washington metropolitan area came into view, with the names of every neighborhood clearly labeled. She zoomed in to rooftop level and said softly, “I can take a camera from here and look up and down a street.” As to complaints that she
plays fast and loose with civil rights, Lanier is unfazed.
WAMU radio (88.5 FM), whether she would stay on the job if Fenty were to lose his bid for reelection in the fall, Lanier said, “The people determine whether I stay or go. That’s who I work for.” Throughout the dinner, the people kept waving and stopping by the table to express their appreciation. Outside the restaurant, you’d have thought she was a rock star. “Chief Lanier, may I take a
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier holds a 71 percent approval rating among District residents.
“We’ve got the kind of community cooperation going where people are starting to believe that we can get under a hundred homicides this year,” she said. “It’s a symbolic number, but it’s important because it represents the realization of a belief that we can make this a safe city for everybody.” Asked last week by Kojo Nnamdi, talk show host on
picture with you?” a man asked as he handed a cellphone camera to one of her assistant chiefs. From across the street, a woman who appeared to be in her late teens swooned: “Chief Lanier! I’m so proud of you.” So, I mused, that she, of all people, appeared to have overcome the burden of race and gender in a city frequently divided by both. “When I put on this uniform, I am not white, nor am I a woman,” Lanier replied. Then, after smoothing a swath of blond hair beneath her chief ’s hat, she added with a streetwise twang, “I am the po-lice.”
milloyc@washpost.com
whose reputation, Torres said, has been seriously harmed.
Other funds untapped Centro Familia’s quest for reno-
vation funds dates back several years. In 2008, it won General As- sembly approval for a $175,000 bond bill to help pay for the reno- vation. But Centro Familia never tapped the funds, state records show.
Still, Centro Familia had said it would open a new child-care cen- ter in early 2009, according to documents the organization sub- mitted to the county. In August 2008, the group had moved into First Baptist Church of Wheaton and soon signed the renovation contract, which included an at- tachment saying it was for a “pro- posed” site on Amherst Avenue. But Centro Familia never ac- quired the Amherst Avenue build- ing. “That did not work out,” said
David Anderson, chairman of Centro Familia’s board of direc- tors.
County records also show that Centro Familia had first tried to get the county’s health and hu- man services agency to foot the bill for computers and software but was turned down. Centro Fa- milia then submitted about $5,000 in computer and software invoices to General Services, which paid them, unaware that another agency had already re- jected them. “That’s very troubling,” Dise
said. Anderson said it is the county
that owes Centro Familia money, not the other way around. The group would like to pay off its creditors, he said. He declined to say how much is owed. “It’s Centro Familia, so let’s go ahead and pour salt on it, pile on because we can,” he said. “There are no assets or resources. What are you going to do? Go after the director?”
spivackm@washpost.com
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