The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump's Deportation Plans
So this has the dual advantage of lining his buddies' pockets even more. Again, I think it's more about the benjamins than anything else.
The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump's Deportation Plans
One reported plan calls for doubling the daily number of detained immigrants.
Madison Pauly
Feb. 21, 2017 6:00 AM
A private prison company is reportedly seeking to reopen the Willacy County Correctional Center, which used to hold detained immigrants. David Pike/AP
Immigration agents sparked panic across the country last week, when a series of high-profile operations made it clear that a new era of crackdowns on undocumented immigrants had begun. Coming on the heels of a couple of major executive orders on immigration, the arrests and deportations were a very public reminder of President Donald Trump's promise to deport upwards of 2 million immigrants upon taking office.
But given that America's detention system for immigrants has been running at full capacity for some time now, where is the president going to put all of these people before deporting them?
In new jails, for starters. In the same executive order that called for the construction of a southern border wall, Trump instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build out its sprawling network of immigration detention centers. Starting "immediately," his order said, ICE should construct new facilities, lease space for immigrants alongside inmates in existing local jails, and sign new contracts—likely with private prison companies. The scale of that expansion became clearer on February 5, when the Los Angeles Times reported on a memo handed down in late January from White House immigration experts to top Homeland Security officials. The document called for raising the number of immigrants ICE incarcerates daily, nationwide, to 80,000 people.
In late January, a memo to top Homeland Security officials called for raising the number of immigrants ICE incarcerates daily to 80,000 people.
Last year, ICE detained more than 352,000 people. The number of detainees held each day, typically between 31,000 and 34,000, reached a historic high of about 41,000 people in the fall, as Customs and Border Protection apprehended more people on the southwest border while seeing a simultaneous rise in asylum seekers. But doubling the daily capacity to 80,000 "would require ICE to sprint to add more capacity than the agency has ever added in its entire history," says Carl Takei, staff attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project. It would also take an extra $2 billion in government funding per year, detention experts interviewed by Mother Jones estimated. And, Takei warned, "we don't know if 80,000 is where he'll stop."
Yet even if ICE does not adopt an 80,000-person detention quota, other changes laid out in Trump's executive orders suggest that vastly more people will be detained in the coming months and years. For example, Trump ordered ICE to prioritize deporting not only immigrants who been convicted or charged with crimes, but also those who had "committed acts that constitute a chargeable offense"—a category that could include entering the country illegally and driving without a license. Trump also ordered Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who oversees ICE, to take "all appropriate actions" to detain undocumented immigrants while their cases are pending.
Beyond that, ICE could stop granting parole to asylum seekers, explains Margo Schlanger, a former Obama administration official who served as Homeland Security's top authority on civil rights. With ICE taking enforcement action against more categories of immigration offenders and releasing fewer of them, Schlanger says, "we could get to a very large sum of people in detention very quickly."
It's not difficult to guess who profits. In an earnings call last week, the private prison giant CoreCivic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) announced that it saw the ICE detention expansion as a business opportunity. "When coupled with the above average rate of crossings along the southwest border, these executive orders appear likely to significantly increase the need for safe, humane, and appropriate detention bed capacity that we have available," CoreCivic President and CEO Damon Hininger said.
more...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/trumps-immigration-detention-center-expansion
= new reply since forum marked as read
