The business aspects of get-tough immigration policy

local governments are also attempting to take advantage of this rising demand for immigrant prison beds by opening their jails to immigrants under ICE and DOJ custody and by building new jails to meet the anticipated increased demand.

Financial considerations weigh heavily for cash-strapped county commissions and sheriff departments. As Sheriff Roger Mulch told Jefferson County (Illinois) commissioners in late February 2008, “ICE, during the last three months, has been hot to do business with us.” Each locality negotiates independently with ICE and USMS to set the per diem rates, and as the demand from the feds for local jail beds increases, county sheriff departments are negotiating ever-higher rates.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Texas, prisons are a booming industry. Near the border town of Del Rio, the county’s Val Verde Correctional Facility, which is owned and run by GEO Group, had only 180 beds eight years ago. Today, after undergoing its second 600-bed expansion, the maximum-security jail can fit 1,425 prisoners.

In Texas’ Willacy County, the county government opened the country’s largest immigrant detention center in 2006, and is currently pursuing a federal contract to host one of three new family detention centers for immigrants.

County Commissioner Ernie Chapa, explaining how the county government financially depends on jailing immigrants, said: “We would love to have 2,500 [illegal immigrants] but we know that’s not going to be … If we get 2,200 to 2,300, we’d be very happy.”

Speaking at the celebration of the opening of the new jail for immigrants, Willacy County Judge Simone Salinas said, “We are proud to have been able to bring on these new detention beds in record time, which will result in improved border security not only for county residents but also our nation.”

“You talk about economic development, this is it,” Salinas told a reporter, noting the county’s initial cut is $2.25 a day per occupied bed.

A year later, a new agreement with ICE for another thousand beds was greeted enthusiastically by some officials in what is one of the poorest counties in the nation. The new County Judge Eliseo Barnhart said the expansion of the immigrant detention center run by CCA will “bring jobs that are needed in Willacy County and it means income, which we desperately need.”

“It’s almost like a futures market. You have private prison companies gambling on expansion of the immigrant detention system, and basically prison speculators who are convincing communities to do this,” Bob Libal, director of Grassroots Leadership in Austin and an organizer with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons, told the Denver Post. “It’s a sick market, but a market nonetheless,” Libal said.

The numbers

  • Immigrants caught by DHS in 2007: 960,756
  • ICE detentions that year: 311,169
  • Rise in detentions since 2006: 21 percent
  • DHS 2009 budget for Border Security and Immigration Enforcement: $12.14 billion
  • Change from 2008: up 19 percent
  • Change since Bush took office: up more than 150 percent
  • Money for ICE “custody operations”: $1.8 billion
  • Number of new “beds” this will provide: 1,000
  • Total number of 2009 ICE beds: 33,400
  • Average per diem for immigrant detention to private prison firms in 2007: $87.99

* Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/.