Team Trump has already announced its intent to double the capacity of America's immigrant detention centers, and it's likely that further capacity will be needed if his white nationalist team truly intends to round up and deport millions of undocumented residents. This may be causing a nationwide fury among, you know, decent people, but there's at least one group of very not-decent people celebrating our new national xenophobia: private prison companies:
As of November, a whopping 65 percent of ICE detainees were held in facilities run by private prison companies, which typically earn a fee per detainee per night and whose business model depends upon minimizing costs to return profits to their shareholders. Since Trump's election, private prison stocks have soared, and two new, for-profit detention centers are opening in Georgia and Texas.
Another private prison company, Management & Training Corp., is reportedly seeking a contract with ICE to reopen the Willacy County Correctional Institution, a troubled detention camp that held up to 2,000 ICE detainees in Kevlar tents between 2006 and 2011. "Historically, ICE has relied heavily on the private prison industry every time the detention system has expanded," Takei says. "There's little doubt in my mind that they will continue to rely on the private prison industry in what's going to be the biggest expansion of the agency in history."
Yep. There's a profit to be made in building the detention camps, and the more aggressively Trump's White House moves to keep his campaign promise of deporting millions, the larger those camps are going to have to be.
Oh, and you don't make a profit running a private prison company by focusing on humane conditions. The people being rounded up may be guilty only of outstaying their visas or similar crimes, but they may find themselves in private detention facilities previously fired by other federal agencies for patterns of abuse and neglect.
Last summer, after an investigation by The Nation revealed a pattern of severe, longtime medical neglect in the 1,100-bed facility—which had gone months without a doctor—the US Bureau of Prisons decided to pull its inmates out and cancel its contract with CoreCivic. Yet less than a month after the last federal prisoner was transferred out, ICE was already negotiating an agreement with the county and CoreCivic to detain immigrants in the newly vacant facility. Four hundred immigrants are currently detained there.
At some point it is almost certain that somebody is going to die in one of these half-assed detention facilities—again, I mean—and it's going to be all on Trump. That person will probably have a compelling life story. That person will probably have a distraught family eager to go on television and demand answers for why it happened. That person will probably have been put in one of these second-tier facilities for crimes of paperwork, not violence.
The White House will have to step up with some really top-notch lying after that. But it's coming. The White House's contempt for the welfare of these families makes it inevitable.