The Trump administration is looking for the expansion of the immigration detention system

By Sara Cline and Kate Brumback, Associated Press

Jena, La. (AP) – In the midst of rural crayfish farms in Louisiana, pines and cafes imposing in the service of Po’boys, nearly 7,000 people are waiting in immigration detention centers to find out if they will be expelled from the United States.

If President Donald Trump’s administration has its way, the ability to hold tens of thousands of other migrants will soon be added throughout the country, because the United States is looking for an explosive expansion of what is already the largest immigration detention system in the world.

Trump’s efforts to make mass deportations as promised in the 2024 campaign represent a potential boon for private prison companies and a challenge for government agencies responsible for the ordered expulsion of immigrants. Some criticisms say that the administration’s plans also include a deliberate attempt to isolate prisoners by locking them and holding legal proceedings far from their lawyers and support systems.

The acting director of the immigration and customs agency Todd Lyons said at a conference on border security in Phoenix last week that the agency needed to improve to treat this as a business “and suggested that the country’s expulsion system could work” as Amazon, trying to have your product delivered in 24 hours. “

“So trying to understand how to do this with human beings and trying to bring them almost all over the world is really something for us,” said Lyons.

Ice takes measures to add more immigration beds

This month, ICE invited companies to subject contracts to operate detention centers on country sites to up to 45 billion dollars while the agency is starting to go from its current budget for around 41,000 beds to 100,000 beds.

The money is not yet there, but the contracts are already awarded. The room has narrowly approved a large expenditure bill which includes $ 175 billion for the application of immigration, approximately 22 times the annual budget of the ICE. The agency’s over 100 years of detention centers at the national level currently contain around 46,000 people, causing overcrowding in places such as Miami.

Last week, ICE awarded a value of a value of up to 3.85 billion dollars to deploy Resources LLC to operate a detention camp at the base of Fort Bliss’s army in Texas. The little -known company moves its activities for border patrol tents for people arriving in the United States – most of which are closed – to ice facilities for expelled people.

The Geo Group Inc. obtained a contract for 1,000 beds in Newark, New Jersey, worth $ 1 billion over 15 years and another for 1,800 Baldwin beds, Michigan. Corecivic Inc., won a contract to house 2,400 people in families with young children in Dilley, Texas, for five years.

The stock market has rewarded these two private correction companies. Geo’s share price has climbed 94% since the election of Trump. Corecivic’s shares jumped 62%.

Louisiana ranks n ° 2 in the country in the space of immigration detention

Louisiana, which has relatively few immigrants relatively few and does not bite Mexico, may not seem to be an obvious choice to establish an immigration center in detention. But the circumstances have converged towards the end of the last decade which allowed the ice to take up five old criminal prisons in the state in 2019 only.

Now the state is second behind Texas in the quantity of bed space it offers to prisoner immigrants. The ice has been attracted to the state in part by relatively low labor costs, a generally favorable political environment and a recently emptied prisons.

State laws in 2017 reduced criminal sanctions, reducing the need for prison and prison prisons. In rural areas, where a correctional establishment is often a main engine of the local economy, officials were impatient to sign immigration detention contracts.

“Because Louisiana was a leading incarcher in the world, it is not as if you have local legislators who are against prisons or against the industrial prison industrial complex and ensure that they continue to take place,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiane.

The Conservative Federal Courts in the West District of Louisiana and the 5th Circuit Court of American Appeals make more difficult for the inhabitants of Louisiana immigration to challenge the conditions of detention or to appeal to the decisions of the Immigration Court, said Mary Yanik, professor and co -director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the Tulane University Law School.

“The ice has fundamentally chosen the courts where their affairs are heard by locating detention centers in specific places,” she said.

Detention centers are often a few hours before cities and lawyers

The nine centers for the holding of Louisiana immigration are in the rural regions of the north or west of the state. This means a journey of several hours compared to its largest cities, where immigration defenders and lawyers are grouped. Inmates have long complained about isolation.

Being detained under “deplorable conditions” and isolated from their families and support networks can lead people to stop fighting against their expulsion and facilitating the resumption of ice, said Carly Pérez Fernández, spokesperson for the detention surveillance network, who helped organize demonstrations on a national level against ice infection on Thursday.