For-profit prisons stand to make a killing on the SB1070 ruling.
We are quick to look the other way when undocumented workers take on difficult and dangerous jobs that most Americans will not do, and yet we’re shocked when these “hidden” workers show up in our emergency rooms or try to send their kids to school.
For-profit prisons like Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group now stand to make a killing on the SB1070 ruling after raking in hundreds of millions detaining illegal immigrants since ’05. Think they have any interest in immigration reform or legalizing guest workers?
From The Huffington Post
Arizona Immigration Law Ruling May Mean Boon For Private Prison Business
By Chris Kirkham
As the Supreme Court upheld a central provision of Arizona’s controversial immigration law on Monday -– a requirement for law enforcement to check the legal status of suspected undocumented immigrants — a powerful corporate lobby may stand to benefit: the private prison industry.
For-profit prison companies including Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group Inc. have capitalized on the immigration crackdown over the past decade, now controlling nearly half of the nation’s vast immigrant detention system. Both companies have more than doubled revenues from the business of detaining immigrants since 2005, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Some immigration reform advocates and lawyers have argued that the upholding of the so-called “show me your papers” portion of Arizona’s SB 1070 may bring more undocumented immigrants into the web of federal immigration enforcement, resulting in increased detentions and deportations.
“This is really the pointy end of the sword of SB 1070,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants’ rights group. “It provides a real boon, a real growth opportunity for the private prison industry in the State of Arizona.”
A Corrections Corporation of America spokesman said that “under longstanding policy, CCA does not and has not ever taken positions on or promoted any sentencing or detention legislation.” A spokesman for the GEO Group did not respond to questions. In the past, CCA officials have stressed that the federal government, not local law enforcement, makes the ultimate decision on which undocumented immigrants should be detained.
Federal officials attempted to assert their authority in Arizona on Monday by rescinding previous agreements with state law enforcement agencies to enforce immigration law at a local level. A senior administration official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement has formally told agents in Arizona to prioritize only the most serious violations referred by local law enforcement. Those include potential undocumented immigrants with a criminal history and repeat border crossers.
“We will not allow a state to set our enforcement priorities,” the senior administration official said.
Yet legal observers argue that the federal government’s talk of prioritizing certain immigrants is at odds with the recent drive of President Barack Obama’s administration to appear tough on immigration enforcement. The administration has deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants, approaching nearly 400,000 each of the last two years, and critics have said the increased Arizona enforcement could bring more opportunities for detention and deportation.
“The main issue here is that there continues to be a focus on deporting a lot of people,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University’s School of Law. “There’s a sort of pride in the number of people, and a pride in the number of people who happen to come in through an arrest, no matter what the arrest was.”
The potential of future litigation remains likely. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who signed Arizona’s immigration law in 2010, noted in a statement Monday: ”Our critics are already preparing new litigation tactics in response to their loss at the Supreme Court, and undoubtedly will allege inequities in the implementation of the law.”
Corrections Corporation of America has strong ties in Arizona, operating three detention centers housing nearly 2,000 undocumented immigrants in the state. Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic U.S. senator from Arizona, sits on CCA’s board of directors. And several CCA lobbyists in Phoenix have worked for or consulted with Brewer.
Critics have questioned CCA’s ties to Arizona’s law. As written, the law in part mirrors draft model legislation on immigration enforcement developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative state legislators and business representatives tied to the drafting of Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law.
Until 2010, a CCA senior director, Laurie Shanblum, sat on the ALEC executive task force for public safety and elections, along with state Sen. Russell Pearce (R), who introduced SB 1070. Parts of the Arizona law, including the section upheld by the Supreme Court, are word-for-word the same as the ALEC public safety task force’s model legislation, according to a review of documents posted online by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy group.
Machak, the CCA spokesman, said that “any suggested connection between our company and Arizona’s immigration law is baseless.”
Though model language developed by ALEC is similar to the language in SB 1070, others have taken credit for helping to draft the law, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who worked as an immigration advisor to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush presidency. Kobach has advised other states and towns in developing immigration-related legislation, including Alabama.
GEO Group executives in the past have not disputed that enforcement efforts like Arizona’s immigration law may have positive impacts on their business. In a 2010 GEO Group earnings call after Brewer signed the Arizona law, an analyst asked executives whether the new legislation might affect business.
Wayne Calabrese, then the company’s chief operating officer, said the law “certainly indicates a level of frustration by the public,” according to a transcript of the call. He added: “I can only believe that the opportunities at the federal level are going to continue apace as a result of what’s happening. … That to me at least suggests there’s going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do.”
“Private prison companies are very explicit that they think the growth area for them is federal detention, and that means primarily immigration detention,” said Emily Tucker, director of policy and advocacy for Detention Watch Network, an immigrants’ rights group. “They’re hoping this will mean more contracts for more detention beds.”
Here’s another article–this one much more in-depth–from Kirkham earlier this month:
Private Prisons Profit From Immigration Crackdown, Federal And Local Law Enforcement Partnerships
By Chris Kirkham
PINAL COUNTY, Ariz. — On a flat and desolate stretch of Interstate 10 some 50 miles south of Phoenix, a sheriff’s deputy pulls over a green Chevy Tahoe speeding westbound and carrying three young Hispanic men.
The man behind the wheel produces no driver’s license or registration. The deputy notices $1,000 in cash stuffed in the doorframe — payment, he presumes, for completed passage from Mexico. He radios the sheriff’s immigration enforcement team, summoning agents from the U.S. Border Patrol. Soon, the three men are ushered into the back of a white van with a federal seal.
This routine traffic stop represents the front end of an increasingly lucrative commercial enterprise: the business of incarcerating immigrant detainees, the fastest-growing segment of the American prison population. The three men loaded into the van offer fresh profit opportunities for the nation’s swiftly expanding private prison industry, which has in recent years captured the bulk of this commerce through federal contracts. By filling its cells with undocumented immigrants caught in the web of increased border security, the industry has seen its revenues swell at taxpayer expense.
The convergence of the people on the Interstate on this recent afternoon, as well as the profits that flow from imprisoning immigrants, are in part the result of concerted efforts by the private prison industry to tilt immigration detention policies in its favor, a Huffington Post investigation has shown.
In Washington, the industry’s lobbyists have influenced policy to secure growing numbers of federal inmates in its facilities, while encouraging Congress to increase funding for detention bedspace. Here in this southern Arizona community, private prison companies share the spoils of their business with the local government, effectively giving area law enforcement an incentive to apprehend as many undocumented immigrants as they can.
This confluence of forces has contributed to a doubling of the ranks of immigrant detainees, to about 400,000 a year. Nearly half are now held in private prisons, up from one-fourth a decade ago, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The two largest for-profit prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group, Inc., have more than doubled their revenues from the immigrant detention business since 2005, according to securities filings.
The companies’ efforts have been directed primarily at influencing decisions by DHS and Congress, which approves final funding for immigration enforcement and detention budgets.
Over the years, CCA has hired a number of former federal insiders to meet with policymakers and handle its contracts. Kim Porter, a former top detention and deportation officer at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is a senior director at the company who manages immigration contracts.
Machak, the CCA spokesman, says the company has been pursuing the same essential business for decades, while delivering value to taxpayers.
“The formation of the Department of Homeland Security in response to 9/11 did not change our practices in any way,” he says. According to Machak, the recent increases in lobbying are due to the “heightened sophistication of the services we provide, which ultimately result in taxpayer savings and increased quality.”
Campaign contributions from both CCA and GEO Group have more than doubled over the past decade, according to a review of campaign finance reports. More than a third of the money CCA has given to congressional candidates over that period has gone to members of the appropriations committees in the House and Senate — the politicians who control the federal purse strings.
The lobbying efforts have been maintained under the Obama administration, though not at the same level as during the Bush administration, when the detention system grew fastest. Funding for new beds has also continued to increase under Obama, and deportations in recent years have reached record numbers, angering immigration reform advocates.
Responding to questions about private prison lobbying, a spokeswoman for ICE, Gillian Christensen, says the agency “routinely evaluates the agency’s detention space needs and awards contracts based on fluctuating detainee populations around the country and the progress of the agency’s overarching detention reform efforts.”
Those efforts include consolidating detention centers in “strategic locations” closer to consulates and pro-bono legal services, she says. As part of that consolidation, ICE is considering two contracts with municipalities near Miami and Chicago — contracts involving CCA — to run new detention centers.
The administration has pledged to focus detention and deportation resources on those with criminal records. During the last two years, the percentage of criminal deportations has increased along with the total, from 48 percent to 54 percent of the nearly 400,000 undocumented immigrants who were deported, according to DHS statistics. But critics complain that stepped-up enforcement has also led to increased apprehensions of “low-priority” undocumented immigrants — those without criminal records.
Christensen says the agency has focused on “smart and effective immigration enforcement which focuses the agency’s limited resources on our enforcement priorities, which include convicted criminal aliens, immigration fugitives, recent border crossers and those who re-enter the country illegally after being removed by ICE or otherwise abuse the nation’s immigration system.”
From 2005 until 2012, the budget for ICE detention operations more than doubled, soaring from $864 million to more than $2 billion in 2012, according to the agency’s budget. So did the capacity of the detention system, which jumped from 18,000 beds in 2003 to 34,000 by last year.
