As Trump Border Crisis Continues, For-Profit Private Prison Companies Lobby for Harsh Policies

Interview with Karina Moreno, assistant professor with Long Island University’s School of Business, Public Administration and Information Sciences, conducted by Scott Harris

After weeks of growing outrage, protests and government agency confusion, President Trump issued an executive order on June 20, reversing the policy he initiated to separate children from their immigrant parents seeking asylum or refuge in the U.S. However, only about 500 children have been reunited with their parents in the week after the executive order, leaving over 1,500 families still separated.  Disturbingly, there are signs that both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) still do not have a viable plan in place to locate and bring children back to their mothers and fathers.
 
While administration officials maintained that Trump’s “zero tolerance” edict was still in effect, spokespersons with DHS acknowledged they are now releasing detained undocumented immigrants with a small fine or a promise to appear at a future court date, because the government doesn’t have sufficient detention beds to house those arrested. Adding to the confusion, the president sent a tweet advocating that immigrants should be deported without “judges or court cases” to stop people being able to “invade” the U.S., essentially pushing for the unconstitutional denial of due process. All this has occurred as the Republican-controlled House and Senate appear incapable of passing immigration reform legislation into law.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Karina Moreno, assistant professor with Long Island University’s School of Business, Public Administration and Information Sciences. An immigrant from Monterrey Mexico herself, here, Moreno discusses President Trump’s reversal of his own policy of separating immigrant families and the conditions inside private, for-profit immigrant detention centers run by companies supportive of Trump.

KARINA MORENO: We had, of course, (the) Trump administration give a couple of warnings of what they were considering, you know, passing as law throughout their administration. And (Attorney General) Jeff Sessions had said a couple times, “Be forewarned, this is not, you know, your ‘things as usual.’ This is the Trump administration.” And so we got the zero tolerance initiatives. And what that means is a couple of things. Number one, it meant sadly, separation. This was completely new. So many issues having to do with the situation are not new. And, we can link them to the Obama administration. We could link them to the previous administration in power before. But family separation was absolutely one of the things novel and new about the Trump administration. Number two was women were not, are not, allowed to petition for asylum anymore on the grounds of domestic violence, which is a huge women’s issue and huge human rights issue. Number three, families are no longer allowed to petition for asylum to United States on the grounds of gang violence. And this is completely different from what we’ve seen in the past.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Karina, what are the prospects that we’re going to see any substantive move to reunify these families with their children?

KARINA MORENO: Well, the thing that we’re seeing right now with the Trump administration, that’s how the United States treats immigrants and this includes asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented immigrants. Humanitarian programs like TPS (Temporary Protected Status) from Honduras, as well as legal immigrants that have green card status. Even though these children are taken in by the Department of Health and Human Services, we had over 1,500 children that were lost by the federal government and this means that they were lost in the sense of the federal government handed over their custody to someone who claimed to be their sponsor or guardian and then just didn’t follow up with that person and doesn’t know where they are, so they just lost track of them. It’s a complete devaluing of brown lives, of immigrant lives, where they just say, you know what? It’s not even worth the time. And so they’ve lost children.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Karina, I wanted to ask you about conditions in these immigration detention centers. From my understanding, many of these immigration detention centers are farmed out to private-for-profit corporations. That’s led to a lot of concern across the country about the conditions there and the accountability and transparency. Say a bit about what your major concerns are here with a private for-profit prison industry and their links with the Trump administration. Apparently, many of these corporate executives have given a lot of money to Mr. Trump during his campaign and continue to support him politically.

KARINA MORENO: So there are two things that I want to stay here. Number one, the private prison industry. We have two main companies. We have Core Civic, their name used to be Corrections Corporation of America, CCA, and we have the Geo Group. These two companies run about 75 percent of the the detention industry, and the detention industry is a billion-dollar industry. CCA, just in 2008 and 2014, gave and lobbied over $10 million. The private prison industry directly lobbies the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Prisons on these issues. This is very similar, Scott, to what happened during the war on during the war on drugs, the private prison industry sponsored different legislature that would ultimately benefit their bottom line. For example, three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentencing and so forth. The same tactics are now being used in what we call the war on terror. Now we have the private prison industry pushing for harsher legislation. The more harsh the legislation is, the more punitive it is, the more profitable it is, so it helps with mandatory detention. It helps with Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. It helps with the bed quota that the Department of Homeland Security has to have. These companies are financing political campaigns, people running for congressional office. And this is not one party. This is completely bipartisan. This is both Republicans and Democrats.

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