Campaign Action
Private prison profiteers make a fortune off the imprisonment of immigrant bodies—private prison company CoreCivic stocks went up 140 percent after Donald Trump’s election—and the detention of migrant children torn from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s barbaric policy is no exception. Escalating arrests and separations are leading to overflowing detention facilities for kids, “an enterprise that,” according to the Daily Beast, “is benefitting intelligence and defense contractors,” like Virginia-based MVM, which has reportedly held “multimillion-dollar contracts” with the government.
MVM, as well as other contractors, “have advertised a flurry of jobs in recent weeks to support the infrastructure surrounding undocumented children whom the Trump administration has taken from their families.” But MVM is not just standing to profit off jailed kids, it’s “a scandal-plagued company that used to work for the CIA” that is standing to profit off jailed kids. Last July, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the group after it found that it had forced a Muslim employee to shave his beard in retaliation for reporting that he was called a racist slur:
The company settled the case months later for $135,000. And it hasn’t been the only recent example of what the EEOC has considered discrimination.
According to a new report from the AP, “about 2,000 children have been separated from their families at the border,” in a period that stretched just six weeks. “It looks right now,” said Neil Gordon, a contractor misconduct watchdog, “the Trump administration’s policies regarding immigration is proving to be a relatively lucrative area for private contractors. I’m concerned with these companies’ track records. Have they been properly thoroughly vetted to ensure their performance histories are relatively satisfactory? Do they have recent cases of misconduct levied against them, any sort of pending legal or enforcement matters concerning issues of misconduct?” When the federal government can’t properly vet its own officials, what’s to assure us sketchy private contractors paid to jail migrant kids can do it?