Importing illegal immigrants – into private Georgia prisons

Importing illegal immigrants – into private Georgia prisons

12:59 pm April 11, 2012, by jgalloway

Interesting piece in The Nation on the attempt in Ocilla, Ga., to balance off the loss of illegal immigrant farm labor by importing illegal immigrants – into a private detention facility. From the lede:

ICE’s reliance on facilities like the Irwin County Detention Center has put small rural towns at the center of one of today’s most contentious policy arguments—how to enforce immigration law. A yearlong investigation … shows how much politics has come to rule detention policy.

Even as Georgia and Alabama passed harsh new immigration laws last year designed to keep out undocumented immigrants, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that politicians from both states were lobbying hard to bring immigrant detainees in.

ICE succumbed to the pressure, sending hundreds of detainees to the financially unstable facility in Georgia that promised to detain immigrants cheaply. That promise came at the expense of the health, welfare and rights to due process of some 350 immigrants detained daily in Ocilla.

Importing illegal immigrants