More than 80 immigrants have died in U.S. custody in the last five years.
By Mary Sanchez
Boulder Daily Camera
Here’s a tip on a surefire investment: prisons.
Or more specifically, companies operating them for a profit.
AP File Photo: Security officers walk to the entrance of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Elizabeth Detention Center, in Elizabeth, N.J., Monday, June 20, 2005. A coalition of immigrant rights activists spoke out against the detention center, which is a converted warehouse. (AP Photo/Mel Evans) |
Long considered a solid business, prison management is expanding as the U.S. government seeks help in warehousing a special category of prey: immigrants being ordered out of the country.
This niche market prospered in the Bush years. The federal government spent $9 million on hunting fugitive immigrants in 2003, according to a new study by the Migration Policy Institute, but by last year the budget for such efforts had mushroomed to $218 million.
In five years work, $625 million was spent, and the government captured 96,000 immigrants, the report found. And all of this chasing down of immigrants meant that new places had to be found to keep them. On the average day, some 33,000 immigrants are held in detention.
Not all the facilities being built to detain immigrants are nice places to stay. Like in the movies, inmates can find themselves sentenced to “the hole.” A German immigrant was allegedly kept in such isolation and later died, apparently in part as a result of an untreated staph infection. More than 80 immigrants have died in U.S. custody in the last five years.
Detainees in Texas immigrant prisons have rioted recently in reaction to a lack of medical care.
In this photo provided by the Department Of Homeland Security, an immigrant child, left, talks with a guard at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, Friday, Feb. 9, 2007. The detention facility house immigrant families awaiting deportation. (AP Photo/Department of Homeland Security, Charles Reed) |
Who are these immigrants and why are they in prison? More than three-quarters of the captured immigrants in the period studied by the Migration Policy Institute had no criminal convictions.
Some immigrants who are held in detention are families, people who have applied for asylum in the U.S. to escape horrors in their own countries and await hearings on their pleas. Several prisons are dedicated exclusively to immigrant families, and more are in the planning stages.
If all of this makes you a little queasy, good! You have a conscience.
With plans for more private detention sites still in the works, it’s an open question whether the immigration policies of the Bush administration will carry on under President Obama.
A good way to approach the immigration problem would be to rework numbers allowed legal entry, to control the borders better and to find a way to legalize those undocumented immigrants who have otherwise been good citizens.
Those changes, in addition to deporting those with no valid reason to stay, would substantially decrease the illegal immigrant population, nipping the need for new prisons.
But if Obama is committed to change, he’d better act fast. Because good intentions are one thing, but uprooting entrenched government contractors is another.
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