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$800 Million in Taxpayer Money Paid to ICE Private Prisons Who Donate to Republicans While Immigrants Work for Pennies
Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business. GEO Group expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to Trump’s campaign & inaugural.
These are dangerous times for undocumented immigrants. ICE has been super-charged by the Trump administration. And ICE’s empowerment has been lucrative for the companies that both cage and employ immigrants...
If the prior two sentences make your blood boil, you must read on. Follow the money - millions of tax dollars to private prison companies. For those keeping score at home, THIS is what actual Fascism looks like. Profit over people. Slave Labor.
A Daily Beast investigation found that in 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what....resembles slave labor.
ICE has told.... its latest detention numbers: 44,892 people as of Dec. 8. Its budget request for the current fiscal year anticipates detaining 52,000 people daily.
Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business.... the private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to Trump’s campaign and inaugural.
THIS IS THE SWAMP and we are jailing and enslaving desperate people trying to immigrate to our "great" nation.
For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which The Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.
Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people—meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that’s not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher. The National Immigrant Justice Center estimated that for November 2017, roughly 71 percent of immigrant detainees, then a smaller total figure, were held in 33 privately operated jails
How many congressmen are invested in or have supported these private prison owners for campaign donations?
While for-profit immigration detention by no means began on Trump’s watch, the Trump administration has been very good for the corporation. In November, GEO Group reported that it expects to earn $2.3 billion this year, including immigration detention revenues—an increase of nearly 1.8 percent from the $2.26 billion it reported in 2017 and up 5.5 percent from the $2.18 billion it earned in 2016.... That same year, GEO gave $281,360 to Trump’s campaign.
In 2004, GEO Group spent $120,000 on federal lobbying. By 2016, it was spending $1.2 million. Fellow private prisons giant CoreCivic spent nearly $10 million between 2008 and 2014 just to lobby the House appropriations subcommittee that controls immigration-detention funding. Together, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the two corporations dished out a combined half-million dollars to Trump’s inauguration committee.
THIS IS THE SWAMP. The detention corporations pay Trump and congressional Republicans, whose enthusiasm for treating immigration as a crime ensures delivery of a growing population of captives to companies that pay them far below a minimum wage.
PRIVATE PRISONS ARE EVERYTHING THAT IS EVIL, EVERYTHING THE USA IS NOT SUPPOSED TO DO.
ICE’s internal detention standards set pay for “voluntary” immigrant labor at only “at least $1.00 (USD) per day.” ...labor within the private prisons is less “voluntary” than the corporations insist.
A class-action lawsuit against GEO Group... claims that tens of thousands of immigrants have been forced to work for their $1 daily wage. A different lawsuit... claims “systematic and unlawful wage theft, unjust enrichment, and forced labor,” including a scheme in which the corporation requires work to “buy the basic necessities—including food, water, and hygiene products—that GEO refuses to provide for them.” Washington State sued GEO Group in 2017 for paying its detainees $1 a day—or sometimes in what the complaint calls “snack food”—rather than the $11/hour state minimum wage.
...for-profit prisons “consistently and substantially” hold immigrants longer than public ones—about 87 days on average for people ultimately granted relief, versus 33.3 days in public prisons.
Fifteen of the 179 detainees who died in ICE custody between October 2003 and February 2018 were held at a single private immigration detention center, run by CoreCivic....
Read the full story below for more horrific details.