Congress Mandates Private Jail Beds for 34,000 Immigrants

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-24/congress-fuels-private-jails-detaining-34-000-immigrants.html


Former grocery cashier Noemi Romero said she wanted to get the temporary legal status that became available in 2012 for people brought illegally to the U.S. as children.

Noemi Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 3, was arrested in January working at a Phoenix grocery store, where she used someone else’s name to get the job.

Romero, a 21-year-old who likes to draw and dance, spent the next four months behind bars, almost half of it in a cramped cell at a 1,596-bed detention center in Eloy, Arizona, run by Corrections Corp. of America. The company, with Geo Group Inc. (GEO) and other for-profit prison operators, holds almost two-thirds of all immigrants detained each day in federally funded prisons as they face deportation, U.S. data show.

Under law, taxpayers must pay to keep 34,000 people like Romero in jail, at a cost of about $120 each per day, even as the number of immigrants caught sneaking across the border has fallen by more than half since the past recession began.

Since 2009, when then-Senator Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, inserted a change into the Homeland Security Department’s annual spending bill, federal immigration officials have been placed in the unusual position of operating under a statutory quota on how many people to hold behind bars. Congressional Republicans have been defending it ever since.

[RiffRandell]

1. Disgusting and Depressing.

I'm sure most Republicans don't know about this....the irony as they hate immigrants and taxes. My mother-in-law is an educated independent and I brought up the prisons for profit issue months ago and she was clueless.

I live in GA and immigrants make up the majority of construction workers for wealthy (and I'm certain Republican) builders as they will work 7 days a week for CHEAP. I doubt they care if they are legal or illegal.

What can we do? This is really scary. Now we have prison lobbyists....call me a pessimist but I don't think we'll ever get the money out of politics. I like to consider myself a realist.