Sunday, April 26, 2015

"WE CAN'T PUT PEOPLE IN DETENTION FOR THE HECK OF IT"

By Melissa del Bosque
Editor, La Linea Blog

In 2009, Congress passed a statutory quota requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep 34,000 immigrants in jail on a daily basis. 
But immigration patterns are cyclical, and apprehensions – with the exception of an influx of Central Americans in the Rio Grande Valley – are at a 40-year low. Nevertheless, congressmen like John Culberson (R-Houston) want ICE to keep the detention facilities at capacity at all times. Apparently, Culberson wants immigrants locked up even if there’s no legal reason to do so.

Culberson got into a heated debate last week with Sarah Saldaña, the new director of ICE, during an appropriations hearing, over locking up more immigrants in the country’s growing patchwork of private for-profit prisons. Culberson sits on the subcommittee that oversees funding for ICE and Saldaña to her credit pushed back.

In Congress, Geo Group, Corrections Corporation of America and other private prison companies spend millions on lobbying. Much of that lobbying is focused on powerful members of the appropriations committee like Culberson, who received campaign contributions from CCA, which runs detention facilities including Dilley’s controversial South Texas Residential Center, which detains women and children.

A new study by the nonprofit Grassroots Leadership finds that the private prison industry has increased its share of immigrant detention beds by 13 percent since the 2009 quota was passed. For-profit corporations now operate sixty-two percent of ICE immigration detention beds.

At one point during the U.S. House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Saldaña tries to explain to the tea-partier Culberson that she can’t put people in detention “just for the heck of it.”

For rest of story, click on link: http://www.texasobserver.org/blog/lalinea/

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