The 2009 congressional mandate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep a minimum of 34,000 people minimum locked up at any given time is already well-established. But a new report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Detention Watch Network reveals that this federal quota rests, in part, on aggressive deals with companies in the business of locking up families.
"Guaranteed minimums, which appear mostly in ICE contracts with private contractors (though some exist with local governments), guarantee that ICE will pay for a minimum number of people to be detained at any given time," states the report, whose lead authors are Dawy Rkasnuam and Conchita Garcia of Detention Watch Network. "Because the government seeks to avoid paying for detention space that isn't being used, guaranteed minimums are essentially local 'lockup' quotas that influence ICE's decision-making about immigration enforcement, whether or not people will be released, where people will be detained, and ultimately, who will profit or benefit from their detention."
According to the investigation, which based its findings on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, such local quotas are "even more widespread than previously reported, covering at least 24 detention facility contracts," accounting for at least 12,821 of the 34,000 beds established by the national quota. Ninety-three percent of those beds are in privately-run detention facilities.
Comment: The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, which is directly correlated with the rise of the highly profitable private prison system. Conditions in detention centers are barbaric; prisoners are forced to work for substandard wages (if they are paid at all), hunger and lack of medical care is common, basic sanitation is lacking and prisoners are often put into solitary confinement. Immigrants fleeing desperate conditions in their home countries have now discovered what American 'exceptionalism' actually means.