U.S. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada are calling on the Homeland Security inspector general to open a probe into a for-profit, private prison contracted to jail immigrants in the state, following a recent report revealing that the facility employs a captain who posted at a neo-Nazi site and at one time tried to start his own chapter of a white nationalist group.
The request from the senators comes on the heels of a VICE investigation finding that Travis Frey, a captain at private prison profiteer CoreCivic’s Nevada Southern Detention Center, posted on a neo-Nazi site at least a dozen times from 2016 to 2017. Frey, who self-identified as a fascist on the now-closed site, also expressed interest in starting his own chapter of a white nationalist group that played a key part in the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017.
Cortez Masto and Rosen write that the report detailing Frey’s radical views, coupled with further reports of other “recent concerning incidents” at the facility, merit a federal probe right away. “It is imperative that any private company contracted with the federal government to operate a detention facility be held to the highest standards of care and management,” they tell DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari in the letter. CoreCivic, which continues to hold lucrative federal contracts to jail people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, placed Frey on administrative leave following the report, but has not yet fired him.
Abuses of immigrants have been rampant in facilities operated by CoreCivic, which has also been implicated in the death of at least one child. In testimony to Congress last summer, asylum-seeker Yazmin Juárez described “no effort” by staffers at CoreCivic’s Dilley, Texas, migrant jail to separate sick kids from healthy. Her 19-month-old daughter Mariee was cleared as healthy when they arrived, but then became sick. They were released only when Mariee’s condition had deteriorated, and she died in a hospital several weeks after their release. Juárez subsequently filed a $40 million claim against CoreCivic.
Further damning to CoreCivic is that Frey was an employee at the time he made the postings and expressed interest in starting his own white nationalist group, raising even more concern about the safety—and very lives—of other detained immigrants under the company’s watch. “With overwhelming evidence that hate crimes are on the rise in the United States,” Cortez Masto and Rosen continue, “it is critical for our government to take concrete steps to combat them.”