It takes a lot of money to run the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In fiscal 2016 the department’s budget was $6.3 billion, 17 percent more than the year before. Part of the budget increase goes toward the 34,000 beds for detainees at ICE facilities across the country. One of them, the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, has become a long-term depository for immigrants awaiting deportation or hearings on their cases. Almost none of the immigrant detainees in Gadsden is from Alabama. ICE picked them up in places like California, Texas, New York, the Midwest. There are more than detainees in Gadsden, from Jamaica, El Salvador, Somalia and other countries. One of them is Luis Fernando Estela Gomez, from Colombia. He came to the U.S. on a tourist visa 22 years ago and stayed. In 2010 he was arrested for selling stolen wedding dresses and Viagra. Estrela has been at Etowah for three years, after spending a year at a New Jersey detention center. “I don’t imagine it was going to take that long," Estrela said. "And when I got here I found out people have been here like seven years, six years, all kind of times. Then I figured it out, it was going to be a long run.”Immigrant detention is supposed to be brief -- weeks or months at the most. But at Etowah, many inmates are held for years while they go through the legal system. The reason so many detainees are funneled into this Alabama detention center from other states has to do with ICE’s bottom line.“Etowah offers ICE the lowest bargain basement per diem per detainee price in the entire country, so it’s cheaper to house people there,”  Jessica Vosburgh, an immigrant rights attorney in Birmingham, said. It is much cheaper. On average, for every detainee, ICE pays detention centers $124 a day. At Etowah, ICE pays only $45. “So it’s ICE’s preferred facility for the people that they are planning to hold in detention for a long time,” she said. Some ICE contracts offer guaranteed minimums. I...