Washington, DC – The FY ‘06 Commerce Justice Science appropriations bill includes $405 million for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAA), U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced today. The program reimburses states and localities for the costs of incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens.

“This is good news for California,” Senator Feinstein said. “It is the largest federal spending for SCAAP in the past four years. States and localities have shouldered the burden of paying to incarcerate illegal alien criminals for too long.”

“This funding goes a long way toward ensuring that the Federal government lives up to its responsibility to pay for incarcerating these individuals. But there is no question that far more funding is needed, and I will continue to fight in future years to see that California and other states are adequately reimbursed.”

Enacted as part of the Crime Act of 1994, SCAAP has provided states between $250 million and $585 million in reimbursement funding annually from 1996 to 2005.

For the past four years, however, the Bush Administration has proposed no funding for SCAAP and Congress has only provided a fraction of the amount requested by states. In the past three years, Congress has approved the following amounts for SCAAP:

• $250 million for 2003;
• $296.8 million for 2004; and
• $305 million for 2005.

It is estimated that states incur approximately $13 billion in criminal justice costs each year for housing undocumented criminal aliens.

In addition, the Government Accountability Office released a report showing that California and three other states have been reimbursed less than 25 percent for SCAAP in recent years. The report shows that in FY 2003 California spent $635 million and received only $77 million from the Federal government, and in FY 2002 California spent $510 million and received only $66 million from the Federal government.

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