In Texas border towns, illegal immigration is big business

EL PASO, UNITED STATES: For volunteer activists working with immigrants, those who profit from the migrants’ plight are ‘sick.’

But illegal migration is big business in the border state of Texas, generating jobs for private prison operators, money lenders and storefront lawyers.

Texas is at the center of the immigration crisis produced by President Donald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ practice, which has led to the separation of more than 2,000 children from their families who attempted to enter the country illegally or while seeking asylum.

Although Trump on Wednesday ordered an end to the separations, deep confusion lingers over what this will mean on the ground. But in the meantime, the money keeps rolling in for those who benefit from the migrant influx.

More than two-thirds of the nearly 304,000 who entered from Mexico and were detained by border patrol agents in the fiscal year 2017 were in Texas, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Not surprisingly, then, Texas has the largest number of detention centres for immigrants.

The Houston detention centre, built in 1983, was the first privately run prison in modern US history.

Its owners, CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America), and the GEO Group are the two largest prison corporations in the country.

Both are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In all, CoreCivic operates four detention centers in Texas under contract to ICE.

GEO operates three, with a fourth under construction. The two corporations own or operate a total of more than 120 prisons nationwide.

“We are very appreciative of the continued confidence placed in our company by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” GEO president George Zoley said last year in a statement announcing a new federal contract worth US$110 million.

According to the investigative center In The Public Interest (ITPI), privatizing the penal system creates an economic incentive to promote mass incarceration even for minor crimes, such as illegal entry.

The two corporations together “have spent more than US$10 million on political candidates and have spent nearly US$25 million on lobbying efforts since 1989,” according to an ITPI report.

In 2017, GEO and CoreCivic had combined revenue of about US$4 billion, according to the companies’ annual reports.

“It’s an industry that drives the lobby for increased sentences, increases in mandatory minimum sentences, harsher punishment – because every day that they have somebody in a bed, you know, they’re making money,” immigration lawyer Jodi Goodwin, who works for the nonprofit Migrant Center for Human Rights, told AFP. — AFP