Colorado's Phony Cost Study

The Colorado Fiscal Institute has issued a report entitled Misplaced Priorities: SB90 & the Costs to Local Communities, in which it claims that the enforcement of SB90 has proven to be expensive.According to the report, Colorado spends more than $13 million per year as a result of the law by arresting and detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants and reporting them to ICE. However, the National Council of State Legislatures, a non-political association, describes SB90, enacted in 2006, as a bill that, “… prohibits any state or local government from enacting legislation that impedes law enforcement agencies from cooperating or communicating with federal officials concerning an arrestee who is suspected to be illegal.” That clearly implies that the purpose of the law was not to increase local enforcement measures, but rather simply to prohibit any lessening of effort.That means that, contrary to the report’s claim, the law was not responsible for increased costs. In fact, the report is not even logical in the costs that it claims to document. The methodology used was to attribute any period of detention of deportable aliens under a detainer request from the Department of Homeland Security as an additional cost to the state, as if the state were not detaining deportable aliens at the request of federal authorities before the adoption of the 2006 law.This report exemplifies some of the contrived studies that are increasingly appearing to bolster the arguments of the proponents of amnesty for illegal aliens.