The business aspects of get-tough immigration policy
private prison firms and local governments are rushing to supply DHS and the Justice Department with the prisons needed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants captured by ICE and Border Patrol agents.
The number of beds for detained immigrants in DHS centers has increased by more than a third since 2002. There are now 32,000 beds available for the revolving population of immigrants on the path to deportation, and another 1,000 are scheduled to come on line in 2009. This does not include beds for immigrants in DHS custody that are provided by county, state, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 contained an authorization for an additional 40,000 beds to accommodate immigrants under U.S. government custody. At the onset of the get-tough immigration policy two years ago, ICE launched Operation Reservation Guaranteed — its promise to find a detention center or prison bed for all arrested immigrants. The Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) has beds available for detainees-about 180,000 a year, of whom more than 30 percent are held on immigration charges.
Most of the prison beds contracted by ICE and DOJ’s Office of Federal Detention Trustee are with local governments; ICE has more than 300 intergovernmental agreements with county and city governments to hold immigrants, while DOJ has some 1,200 such agreements. In many cases, particularly with contracts for hundreds of prison beds, the local government then subcontracts with a private prison company to operate the facility.
Prison beds translate into per diem payments from the federal government that are above the hotel room rates in the remote rural communities where most of these immigrant prisons are located. With these per diems running from $70 to $95 for each immigrant imprisoned, local governments and private firms are eager to expand existing facilities or to create new ones.
Depending on immigrants
Barry writes that The uptick in immigrant detention that saved the industry in 2000 (see below) turned into an upswing in demand for immigrant prison beds after /11 and the ensuing immigrant crackdown. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has reported record profits for the last few years, largely on the strength of increasing demand from its ICE and USMS “customers.”
Forty percent of total CCA revenue comes from three federal contractors: Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. In its 2007 Security and Exchange Commission
