ICE acting director wants to treat deportations ‘like a business,’ aspires to Amazon-style speed

The Otay Mesa Detention Center operated by CoreCivic The firm is among those garnering new contracts as the Trump administration detains more immigrants Photo by Adrian Childress Times of San Diego Amid rural Louisiana s crawfish farms towering pine trees and cafes serving po boys nearly people are waiting at immigration detention centers as they face deportation from the United States If President Donald Trump s administration has its way the limit to hold tens of thousands more foreigners will soon be added around the country as the U S seeks an explosive expansion of what is already the world s largest immigration detention system Trump s effort to conduct mass deportations as promised in the campaign represents a likely bonanza for private prison companies and a challenge to the regime agencies responsible for the orderly expulsion of immigrants Several critics say the administration s plans also include a deliberate attempt to isolate detainees by locking them up and holding court proceedings far from their attorneys and help systems The acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency Todd Lyons mentioned at a territory line protection conference in Phoenix last week that the agency demands to get better at treating this like a business and suggested the nation s deportation system could function like Amazon trying to get your product delivered in hours So trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us Lyons announced More beds This month ICE invited companies to bid on contracts to operate detention centers at sites around the country for up to billion as the agency begins to scale up from its current budget for about beds to beds The money isn t yet there but contracts are already being awarded The House narrowly approved a broad spending bill that includes billion for immigration enforcement about times ICE s annual budget The agency s -plus detention centers nationwide at this moment hold about people causing overcrowding in locations including Miami ICE last week awarded a contract worth up to billion to Deployed Tools LLC to operate a detention camp at the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas The little-known company which has had operations in San Diego is shifting its business from Demarcation Patrol tent encampments for people arriving in the United States The greater part of those are now closed as the firm focuses on ICE facilities for people being deported The Geo Group Inc got a contract for beds in Newark New Jersey valued at billion over years and another for beds in Baldwin Michigan CoreCivic Inc which operates the Otay Mesa Detention Center won a contract to house people in families with young children in Dilley Texas for five years The stock area has rewarded both of these private corrections companies Geo s stock price has soared since Trump was elected Shares of CoreCivic have surged No in immigration detention space Louisiana which has relatively scarce immigrants and doesn t territory line Mexico may not seem like an obvious choice to establish an immigration detention hub But circumstances converged toward the end of the last decade that allowed ICE to take over five former criminal jails in the state in alone Now the state is second only to Texas in the amount of bed space it offers for detained immigrants ICE was drawn to the state in part by relatively low labor costs a generally favorable political circumstances and a ready supply of in the past few days emptied jails State laws in lowered criminal penalties reducing the need for jail and prison beds In rural areas where a corrections facility is often a main driver of the local financial sector officers were eager to sign contracts for immigration detention Because Louisiana was a top incarcerator in the world it s not as though you have local legislators who are against prisons or against having a for-profit prison industrial complex come in and indeed ensure that these continue to run revealed Nora Ahmed legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana Conservative federal courts in the Western District of Louisiana and at the th U S Circuit Court of Appeals make it tougher for people in Louisiana immigration jails to challenge detention conditions or to appeal revealed Mary Yanik co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane University Law School ICE gets to choose basically the courts where their cases are heard by locating detention centers in particular places she reported Hours away from cities and lawyers Louisiana s nine immigration detention centers are in the rural north or western parts of the state That means a drive of several hours from its largest cities where immigration advocates and lawyers are clustered Being held in deplorable conditions and isolated from their families and sponsorship networks can cause people to stop fighting their deportation declared Carly P rez Fern ndez spokesperson for Detention Watch Grid which helped organize nationwide protests against ICE detention on Thursday Detention really plays a crucial role in enabling Trump s cruel mass deportation agenda she explained Increased detention maximum will exacerbate the detention conditions that we already know are inhumane The bulk facilities are a relatively short distance from Alexandria where ICE converted a former military base into a -bed short-term holding center with an adjacent airstrip for deportation flights One facility is in Jena which is home to people about miles from New Orleans The society has only a single advertised hotel called the Townsmen Inn The Jena detention center operated under contract with the Geo Group is surrounded by no trespassing signs fencing with layers of razor wire and armed guards Homero Lopez a lawyer at Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy which provides free representation in Louisiana detention centers commented the faraway location makes it a lot more complex to protest and organize The introduction of video links for immigration court has softened but not eliminated criticism that ICE is deliberately trying to distance detainees from their families attorneys and other forms of assistance Lopez disclosed he s happy to use video conferencing for quick preliminary matters but he prefers to make the drive to appear in person for substantive hearings He declared video links can be dehumanizing and may lead judges to fail to appreciate what s at stake when they are not facing immigrants in person