Privatizing misery, deporting and imprisoning migrants
By Brenda Norrell
SASABE, Ariz. -- The Wackenhut Corporation, whose buses wait along the border to be filled with migrants for deportation, is actually owned by a foreign corporation.
Wackenhut is a subsidiary of the Danish security corporation G4S (Group Securicor) in Denmark.
Privatizing the deportation of migrants, Wackenhut/G4S took over these duties from the U.S. Border Patrol.
The executive director of the watchdog group Private Corrections Institute, Ken Kopczynski, exposed the privatization of the migrant deportation at the US/Mexico border.
Meanwhile, another corporation, GEO Group, Inc., is building migrant prisons for profit. In the year 2007 alone, GEO Group won contracts for a prison in Eagle Pass, Texas; an immigration detention facility in Jena, La. and a detention facility for U.S. Marshals service in Laredo, Tex.
After the Jena, La., immigration detention facility reaches full occupancy with 1,160 inmates in 2008, GEO expects $23.5 million annually in revenues.
Texas has some of the most notorious migrant prisons.
Read more on the profiteering behind the border hysteria: http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/
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Submitted on August 25th, 2007 by Erin RosaCurrently, an inmate rights group in Washington, D.C. has filed a lawsuit alleging "grossly inadequate and inhumane" medical practices in a GEO run facility in North Carolina, where an open sore on an inmate's face was allegedly left to fester until it burst open.
And in an ICE detention facility in Aurora, Colorado the U.S. Government Accountability Office found (PDF) that there were major problems with sanitation, overcrowding, and record keeping—to the point where officials didn't even know which inmates were where and if they had received food.
Last I read, GEO had netted a 7.7 million contract with the Bureau of Prisons to operate community corrections services in Manhattan and the Bronx.