Arresting Illegal Immigrants in Texas Is Making Private Prisons Companies Rich
No detention center has bigger plans for illegal immigrants than the South Texas Family Center in Dilley. The center is run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America and is under expansion. By May 2015, the facility will be able to hold 2,400 people. "If this expansion proceeds, Dilley will be the largest immigrant detention center in the U.S.," says a new report about the troubling role that private prison companies play in U.S. immigration policy. The report was published by Grassroots Leadership, an advocacy group that is critical of the industry.
Using government and financial records and news articles, the Grassroots report details how two companies -- Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group -- have benefited from locking up illegal immigrants, and how the South Texas border surge in arrests has been especially profitable to the CCA and GEO Group. Texas has 7,602 private beds for the immigrant detainees, Grassroots Leadership found, a figure that represents 39 percent of all private prison beds in the whole country.
The arrests, immigration reformers argue, are largely driven not by a public safety need but something more sinister, the so-called "bed quota." In 2010, lawmakers passed a mandate that the Department of Homeland Security "maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds."
In the years since the quota went into effect, lawmakers have warned ICE officials to keep the beds full, and profits for the people running the prisons have jumped.
Read from: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2015/04/illegal_immigration_in_texas_is_making_the_private_prison_industry_lots_of_dough.php
ETA: Related article in the Houston Press.
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/news/2015/04/private_prisons_grow_fat_off_immigrant_detention.php
