Immigrant Detention Centers – Immoral Profits?

Immigrant Detention Centers – Immoral Profits?

Algernon D’Ammassa, Las Cruces Sun-News via USAToday, reports that the major obstacle to scaling back the abuse, neglect and industrial warehousing of human beings in migrant detention centers is the fact that this is a billion-dollar industry. –

“We have a sprawling humanitarian crisis in our hands, and yet so much money is being made, abolishing it will prove difficult even if our politics shift.

The major obstacle to scaling back the abuse, neglect and industrial warehousing of human beings in migrant detention centers is the fact that this is a billion-dollar industry.

Social acceptance of prisons as a profit-seeking enterprise has helped bureaucratize  mass incarceration, transforming it into a goldmine that will be defended vigorously by those raking in the money.

Private prison companies were vacuuming in money from the public sector long before the Trump Administration announced its “zero tolerance” family separation policy this past April, creating thousands more “unaccompanied minors” to be kidnapped by the state and moved around the country to shelters, deprived of contact with their parents.

Thank ICE for the tip

Before that, prisons — yes, prisons, not “detention centers” — for migrant families were a lucrative business for contractors, such as CoreCivic and GEO Group. These two companies alone raked in $985 million from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2017. And revenue from detaining migrants continues to grow, as ICE requests more beds. Then you have the thousands of companies providing goods and services to support this industry.

It is not only money that travels from the public domain to private coffers, but power and accountability.

Citizens can still pressure public officials and agencies through protests and political campaigns, but as the system has privatized, it has rooted itself into the economy. ICE procures the services of thousands of contractors, amounting to $1.7 billion in 2017 alone.

This summer, for example, citizens demonstrated outside the New York City home of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Although Dimon has made statements critical of immigrant detentions, his bank still owns stock in GEO Group and CoreCivic and finances their debt. Those loans build prisons and tent cities.

In Arizona, we see another outcome of privatization: the public sector may be too dependent on private industries to police them. “Too big to fail” also means “too big to regulate.”

Taking away their licenses

Arizona officials are threatening to yank the license from nonprofit corporation Southwest Key, which operates 13 prisons for as many as 1,600 migrant childrenthere, because the company refuses to comply with the state’s child protection laws, has not properly vetted many of its employees, does not have safe and healthy facilities, and exhibited a cavalier response to incidents of sexual abuse of children under its custody.

Yet Arizona finds itself in a public-private trap, as ProPublica reported this week. The federal Office of Refugee Settlement relies on these contractors and “any shutdown would create a tumultuous chain of events for federal and state regulators, who lack options for housing tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who cross the border every year.”

Moreover, journalists Topher Sanders and Michael Grabell wrote:

The Texas-based nonprofit has become an increasingly critical asset for the federal government as the number of children in its custody has reached record numbers — even as the Trump administration has ended the practice of separating children from their parents. Southwest Key has received more than $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts for the shelters and other services in the past five years.

While “abolish ICE” has become a rallying message, activists have turned to its supply chain, applying pressure on companies contracting with ICE.

When tech company Salesforce sought cover by offering a large donation to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, the organization refused the money, and delivered a clear memo for profiteers in evil:

“When it comes to supporting oppressive, inhumane, and illegal policies … the only right action is to stop.”