Detainee Capitalism
Deportations is the smokescreen. Detaining people illegally is the motive.
There are two good things about ICE. The Trump administration's approach to deportation is getting large numbers of Americans to wake up to the reality that immigrants are generally people of good character, hard workers, and they are critical to the economics of local communities. The second good thing is that ICE is so awful and incompetent with its tactics that deportations per month are not even close to what Obama was doing on the regular.
Tactics that force immigrants to go into hiding while motivating their communities to make ICE’s job harder are less efficient than the legal due-process systems we have had in place for years. Duh.
The polling data suggests that the fear-mongering image of what an “illegal” immigrant is has lost its ability to scare people. Seeing good people doing critical jobs get ripped away from their place of work, their homes, and their social gathering places has caused ignorant Americans to realize who “illegal” immigrants actually are.
The MAGA homebuilder in Florida who doesn’t have access to masons, framers, finishing carpenters, roofers, and landscapers anymore is struggling to build homes. He had no idea that these people he pays “off the books” were the people Donald Trump was talking about all along. That’s how dumb these upper class MAGA folks actually are. Don’t smile, the liberals are the real idiots in this story. Read on.
Trump is not dumb. Trump is not concerned with polling data. Trump is not even concerned about future elections being true vote counting exercises. Trump is focused on grift.
Trump’s nazi minion Stephen Miller is in charge of deportations and he is putting huge pressure on regional ICE overlords to hit their quotas. The quota pressure is not measured in deportations per month, it is measured in DETAINEES per month.
You see, all of the latin-looking men from Mexico and South America that are getting rounded up in order to fill our PRIVATELY OWNED DETAINEE FACILITIES are fueling cash flow in the form of monthly fees paid by using TAXPAYER dollars. The fees are PER DETAINEE PER MONTH.
Building horrible cages and packing them with with men, not like you would do with zoo animals but more like you would do with animals heading to a slaughterhouse, is an extremely profitable business.
This essay isn’t really about the behavior of ICE when Donald Trump is president. It’s about the privatized prison system that our nation tolerates.
PRIVATIZED PRISONS FOR CRIMINALS
I think that most Americans living normal middle class lives (like me) have never been sent to prison. We have heard about the privatization of prisons - the increasing reliance on businesses that own and run prisons instead of a prison system run by the government. We might even be aware that one major reason that cannabis remains illegal at the Federal level is because these prison systems lobby that it be kept that way. Incredibly obsolete and unfair laws manufacture criminals which keep prisons filled and that is very profitable.
No other developed nation incarcerates people on the scale that we do. Well, no other nation accepts the intense conflict-of-interest where incarceration is a huge profit motivator either. Call me crazy, but maybe these two things are related.
That said, the judicial system is in the middle. In many states, the judges are corrupted by conflicts too, but at least we do not tolerate a direct path from getting arrested to sitting in prison without any part of the journey going through a court house. A poor person with a crappy lawyer and no money to make bail can sit in prison for insanely long amounts of time BEFORE they face a trial. That sucks but again, at least the judicial system knows about this person.
Anybody who gets arrested, has the “benefit” of their Miranda rights.
"You have the right to remain silent"
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law"
"You have the right to an attorney"
"If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you"
Our system is hugely flawed but there is a system.
DETAINEE CENTERS ARE EVEN BETTER BUSINESS
In MAGA world, the darned problem with printing money from a corrupt and conflicted system of private prisons is that pesky judicial branch. All these woke loser judges and lawyers who spend their time giving people in our country this silly thing called due process are such a pain-in-the ass. The bullies who love arresting people, the greedy bastards who run private prisons, and the huge array of politicians who get fabulous kick backs from this massively scaled method for flushing taxpayer dollars down the toilet are frustrated. It would all be so much easier if we just had a way to push people directly from the streets into detainee centers without all these hassles created by the rule-of-law.
Trump and Stephen Miller get it. In fact they love it because the head fake feeds their true business model.
Step 1: create mass hysteria about the problem of immigrants.
Step 2: Do some high profile roundups of brown-skinned men and fly them directly to El Salvador in order to force the judicial system to have a hissy fit over the deportation, not the detention.
Step 3: “Obey the judges ruling while you appeal” but keep rounding up men that you are not allowed to deport as fast as you can.
Step 4: Turn to the corporations the run privatized prisons and create huge financial incentives to expand detention centers. (The financial incentive being the contracts with ICE to pay monthly fees for each detainee held. The incentive is enticing because the expenses associated with holding prisoners don’t apply here. Detainees have no rights at all.)
WHO ARE THESE PRIVATE COMPANIES?
In the U.S., private prison companies hold contracts with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to detain immigrant detainees. The four huge corporations with the lion’s share of the market are GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and Management Training Corporation. If you click on the links for each company, you will go to their websites which are all brilliant exercises in creating the illusion that this god-awful industry is doing good things.
This industry is built on the fundamental premise that profits come from maximizing the number of people held in their facilities while minimizing the amount of money spent on each person being held. The business model makes all the sense in the world when your sense of decency does not require thinking about detainees as human beings.
THIS IS NOT NEW
Here, I am sourcing data from an article written in December of 2015 which is long before Trump won his first election. (The source is The Center for American Progress. CAP is an independent nonpartisan policy institute that generates fact-based articles and initiatives with the goal of inspiring citizens and political leaders to address flaws in our system of government.)
“Surprisingly, the largest detention and supervised release program in the country is not operated by the U.S. Department of Justice, or DOJ, but by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees the nation’s immigration detention program. According to the DOJ, its Federal Bureau of Prisons had nearly 200,000 individuals in custody as of December 2015. On the other hand, DHS’s immigration detention program detains around 400,000 people each year.”
Think about that fact. In 2015, America’s private prison system was already detaining twice as many immigrants as prisoners.
Go back to 1996, that is when Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which greatly expanded the categories of immigrants who were deportable and subject to mandatory detention. Trump and Miller did not create this awfulness in America, they just exploited what our Congress has been doing for decades.
What a shocker, lobbying spending by the four companies mentioned above grew right alongside the growth of immigrant detainees for years.
Of course, that was data through 2014. Child’s play compared to today when each of the companies probably spends far more than the total that all four were spending on lobbying back then. Today, “lobbying” data is more obfuscated thanks to the full leveraging of the “Citizens United” Supreme court ruling.
CoreCivic, one of the big four mentioned above, appears to spend less money on lobbying than they used to:
This is because members of Congress have created Super PACS which collect money to fund pretty much anything that they can fit under the broad and ambiguous umbrella of political campaign operations and expenses. Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, corporations like CoreCivic can just shove money directly into the pockets of our politicians without all of the formalities required by “lobbying.”
The corrupt conflicts-of-interest are vastly larger than before but far less transparent. Common sense should tell you that it is what it is.
When Biden became president, one of his first executive orders was to ban for-profit prisons. Did you know that the US Marshalls Service never changed its behavior? Instead, lawyers representing the Marshalls Service kept finding loopholes and special exemptions in order to continue to fill the coffers of for-profit prison corporations and enjoy the kickbacks.
Today’s version of ICE is all of this on steroids. Trump and Miller have their team of Nazi-like brownshirts out in the open doing what was kept in the shadows before. Previously, politicians felt some shame over this obviously immoral, unethical, and financially corrupt system. Now, we are proud of our awfulness because cruelty and shamelessness are in vogue.
Decent liberal Americans are “shocked” to learn about this stuff. Come on, man, this head-in-the-sand stuff would make even Captain Louis Renault blush. Moderates and Democrats in America are quick to say that the MAGA folks are ignorant. Really? The MAGA folks are getting rich off their deep knowledge of how our nation has operated for decades. Red states enjoy tremendous economic benefits from the privatized prison system while liberals in deep blue states pretend they don’t exist.
The current outrage over the Trump/Miller ICE initiatives is appropriate and I am glad to see things in the American psyche turning towards a more thoughtful perspective on immigrants but hey, the more liberal leaning members of Congress getting all high and mighty right now have been taking money from the four corporations mentioned above for decades.
It’s a business, you see, and America’s most god-awful businesses are legal enterprises that can do what they want because they can pay the right people.
This is not “breaking news.”