Meanwhile, America resists
Team Trump has already announced its intent to double the capacity of America's immigrant detention centers, and it's likely that further capacity will be needed if his white nationalist team truly intends to round up and deport millions of undocumented residents. This may be causing a nationwide fury among, you know, decent people, but there's at least one group of very not-decent people celebrating our new national xenophobia: private prison companies:
As of November, a whopping 65 percent of ICE detainees were held in facilities run by private prison companies, which typically earn a fee per detainee per night and whose business model depends upon minimizing costs to return profits to their shareholders. Since Trump's election, private prison stocks have soared, and two new, for-profit detention centers are opening in Georgia and Texas.
Another private prison company, Management & Training Corp., is reportedly seeking a contract with ICE to reopen the Willacy County Correctional Institution, a troubled detention camp that held up to 2,000 ICE detainees in Kevlar tents between 2006 and 2011. "Historically, ICE has relied heavily on the private prison industry every time the detention system has expanded," Takei says. "There's little doubt in my mind that they will continue to rely on the private prison industry in what's going to be the biggest expansion of the agency in history."
Yep. There's a profit to be made in building the detention camps, and the more aggressively Trump's White House moves to keep his campaign promise of deporting millions, the larger those camps are going to have to be.
Oh, and you don't make a profit running a private prison company by focusing on humane conditions. The people being rounded up may be guilty only of outstaying their visas or similar crimes, but they may find themselves in private detention facilities previously fired by other federal agencies for patterns of abuse and neglect.
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