To privately house detained illegal immigrants turns into big profits for prisons and detention centers.
By H. Nelson Goodson
May 12, 2011
Atlanta, Georgia - The Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group and other management and training companies who operate private prisons that hold illegal immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charge $200 per night and made more than $5 billion per year in profit. These private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved and ensure access to more immigrant inmates, according to an e-mail circulating by Brave New Foundation Cuéntame on Facebook, a California based organization.
One of the most profitable states for this privately run prisons is Georgia. Last April, the Georgia Republican legislature passed HB 87, a similar Arizona type of SB 1070 immigration enforcement bill to deter an influx of undocumented immigrants to the state. Governor Nathan Deal (R) has yet to sign the bill into law, but promised to do so.
The Georgia department of tourism is claiming that the recent legislative passage of HB 87 bill has began to effect tourism in the state and revenues from tourists are dropping rapidly.
An estimated 480,000 undocumented immigrants reside in Georgia, about 20,000 illegal immigrants more than the state of Arizona.
Immigrants detained by ICE in Georgia end up in one of these prisons costing thousands of dollars per day to hold them. About, 400 thousand undocumented immigrants are deported every year from the U.S. and with the Secure Communities Program (SCP) implemented by ICE, the deportations could rise to 800,000 per year. The program under agreement with states are suppose to target criminal undocument immigrants, but only several hundred thousand have been detained and deported in two years. The rest of the deportations were at least 600,000 non-criminal illegal immigrants who were deported under Secure Communities within several years, according to ICE.
President Barack H. Obama wants the Republicans to engage in immigration reform, but Democrats including himself failed to aggrressively deal with the issue, since being elected. Obama recently confirmed, he won't use his executive authority to stop or stay deportations of non-criminal immigrants, students who would qualify to stay in the U.S. under the DREAM Act, if approved and their parents. Reason cited by the White House, Obama didn't want to "unilaterally change the law" by using executive power.
Obama began his re-election campaign once again promising immigration reform to regain the Latino vote for 2012, but won't stay deportations of their families and relatives. Hispanics voted for Obama in a ratio of 2 to 1 in the 2008 Presidential election, largely because they expected him to push for immigration reform.
U.S. Census officials reported, that 50.5 million Hispanics were counted in 2010, 16.3% of total U.S. population and a 43% growth since 2000.
The National Institute of Migration in Mexico reported 66,704 Mexican nationals were deported from the U.S. between January and February 2011, 63,970 were over 18 and 2,734 were minors. ICE deported, 30,844 in January and 35,860 in February, of the adults, 57,908 were men and 6,062 were women (Source Notimex).
Connected by MOTOBLUR™ on T-Mobile
