Secure Communities 101: Here’s What You Need to Know. Secure Communities is a central program in the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation agenda. But these days, it’s also the most controversial. Last week Inspector General Charles Edwards of the Department of Homeland Security announced that his office would be opening an investigation into the federal government’s handling of the program, which sends fingerprints of anyone who’s booked in a participating local or county jail on to federal authorities who then check out people’s immigration status.
The federal immigration and local law enforcement partnerships, once billed as voluntary, are now being recast as a mandatory program, and counties in California and Maryland and states like Illinois which have attempted to step out of the program have been denied. Immigration advocates contend that not only did the federal government lie to localities about the implementation of the program—this is the charge California Rep. Recent Features : Designed to Kill: Border Policy & How to Change It. This analysis is the work of an individual participant in No More Deaths: for a glimpse into the lives of those who risk death to cross the border, read Four Stories from the Border. for everyone who didn’t make it, and for everyone who did For a number of years now I’ve worked in the desert on the Mexican-American border with a group that provides humanitarian aid to migrants who are attempting to enter the United States—a journey that claims hundreds of lives every year.
We’ve spent years mapping the trails that cross this desert. We walk the trails, find places to leave food and water along them, look for people in distress, and provide medical care when we run into someone who needs it. If the situation is bad enough, we can get an ambulance or helicopter to bring people to the hospital. During this time I’ve been a part of many extraordinary situations and I’ve heard about many more. There is nowhere on earth like the place where we work.
And then there’s this. But to what end? A Brief History of Private Prisons in Immigration Detention | Detention Watch Network. Although the number of privately managed immigration detention beds has grown drastically since 1996, corporations have actually dominated the field for more than two decades. In fact a contract between the INS and the newly formed Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) gave birth to the private prison industry itself in 1983.
Since then, dozens of other companies have emerged to compete for government contracts not only in detention operations, but in peripheral industries such as prison construction and correctional officer services. Companies that run private prisons are responsible to their shareholders, not to the public. The incentive to maximize profit leads private corrections groups to cut expenses by, among other things, keeping facilities chronically understaffed, leading to higher rates of human rights violations and violence (1), and paying significantly less than their public counterparts. In 2010, a CCA supervisor at the company’s T. PrivatePrisonPDF-FINAL%205-11-11. Who’s Profiting More Than $5 Billion Off Of Immigrant Detentions?