A private for-profit immigration detention facility in Nevada has finally fired a captain it had employed who was exposed in a Vice investigation as a member of a neo-Nazi group. “Private prison company CoreCivic, which runs the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, said Friday that Travis Frey, 31, is no longer employed by them,” Vice’s Tess Owen reported.
CoreCivic fired Frey just as Vice was reporting that his ties to white supremacist extremism were far more extensive than previously known. After initially finding that Frey had posted to the now-closed neo-Nazi group’s website at least a dozen times from 2016 to 2017, Vice then uncovered another 130 additional postings dating as far back as 2013, the same year that Frey worked as a shift supervisor at CoreCivic’s North Georgia Detention Center.
Vice reports that in one post from that year, Frey claimed, “God used the white race in Europe to build western civilization,” arguing, “You'd be bowing five times a day towards Mecca if not for the Church and her Crusaders.” In other posts, he promoted “getting rid of the Judaic globalist banksters,” and used a homophobic slur to voice his opposition to a “multicultural rainbow nation.” The year after these postings, Vice reports, Frey moved to a new position “where he assisted supervision of 14 to 15 staff members, 300 U.S. Marshal inmates, and 800 ICE detainees.”
Frey voiced pro-Trump views in at least one posting, with Vice reporting that he expressed frustration at the then-candidate losing the Iowa caucus to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. “Seriously, fuck Iowa,” he wrote. “Those cucked, feral corn n---s [a slur against Native Americans] are too stupid to have their political opinions count for anything.” Frey also sought to start his own chapter of the neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Workers Party while working a CoreCivic facility in Indiana, but, Vice said, “It’s not clear whether he ever followed through.” Not that that changes anything, because his intentions were clear enough.
Following Vice’s initial reporting, Nevada U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen called on the Department of Homeland Security inspector general to open a probe into CoreCivic, citing Frey’s views and reports of other “recent concerning incidents” at the private prison profiteer’s Nevada facility. “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 said.
But officials are instead set on lowering standards and putting the lives and safety of already-vulnerable people at even more risk. Just recently, ICE announced a decision to weaken some immigrant detention standards, “which could have disastrous consequences for the health and safety of thousands of people in immigration detention,” the American Civil Liberties Union said. “The detention of immigrants is a cruel and harmful practice, which has only grown worse under the Trump administration”—and that includes the ongoing use of private prisons.