Inside Bush's Billion-Dollar Immigration Gulag

[AlphaCentauri]

ICE has created a multi-billion dollar industry for holding immigrants deemed "removable" by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The next administration will face an out-of-control immigration enforcement regime that consigns immigrants to a labyrinth of unregulated detention centers, jails, and prisons throughout the country.

While the scope of the detention and imprisonment of immigrants has been greatly expanded by the Bush administration, the problem of unregulated immigrant detention is not new. In the 1990s, increased immigrant detention and federal prison overcrowding led to an outsourcing boom. Instead of being held in federal prisons and detention centers, arrested immigrants increasingly were held in local, state, and privately owned jails and prisons.

But the boom in contracted detention beds for federal detainees produced a series of scandals that alarmed many in Congress. Gross human rights abuses and millions of dollars in overcharges persuaded Congress, prodded by immigrant and prisoner advocates, to create the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT) in the Justice Department (DOJ) in 2000. The newly established OFDT, which opened in September 2001, was authorized to coordinate all outsourcing of federal detainees and oversee the implementation of the new detention standards adopted in 2000.

But the onset of the war on terrorism and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in March 2003 sidelined OFDT's coordination mission. Instead of centralizing detention operations for federal detainees held in non-federal facilities, detention operations have quickly become less coordinated, more diffuse, and riddled with abuse.

More Beds for Immigrants

http://www.alternet.org/rights/89102/?ses=6b9aa407e1e51ca25cbb30963c0bfbf4