The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Adelanto, Calif., is one of the detention facilities operated by GEO Group Inc.
Credit:Richard Vogel/AP
The Trump administration’s immigration policies have drawn condemnation, but increasingly the criticism has also turned to a web of companies that are part of the multibillion-dollar industry that runs detention facilities housing tens of thousands of migrants around the country.
Businesses that supply goods and services to support those detention centers face increasing public and political scrutiny from investors, employees and activists.
Last week, employees at Wayfair protested after one worker discovered the Boston-based company was supplying bedroom furniture to a facility housing migrant children seeking asylum.
And Bank of America said it would stop financing private prison and immigration detention companies, following similar declarations by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Such lending is vital to the construction and expansion of detention facilities, though the industry still has plenty of other options; SunTrust, Barclays, BNP Paribas and other smaller regional banks have not cut ties with the industry.
After American Airlines discovered that migrant […]
Let’s not forget the third driver…and possibly the biggest one…the maintenance of a poor underclass of workers that lives in perpetual fear and poverty.
For decades illegal immigration could have been simply stopped by sanctions on employers of illegals. This has never been done.
The result is a low paid work force that exists without rights to organize for higher wages, press labor disputes over dangerous conditions of employment and one that is resigned to an out-of-system illegal existence living in perpetual fear of being deported and losing everything they have…not just financial resources but friends, family…everything.
The effect is not just felt by the underclass but a much broader swath of Americans who are adversly affected by the wage/resource competition of the illegals.
Of course it keeps the cost of veretables low, the cost of carpenters and masons low, and the cost of maids and house-keepers low…unless one factors in the the unconscionable cost of causing another to live in abject poverty…then the vergetables become so costly that no one can afford them.
GEO and other for profit prison enterprises are a perversion of our democratic and moral values-full stop, end of story! Part and parcel of the prison industrial complex designed to profit from the suffering of fellow humans however guilty or not. These companies have been running state and immigrant prisons for some time but now families and children are growing the bottom line like never before.
Such primitive times we live in that we allow private companies lock up fellow citizens and profit from their labor. That used to be called slavery now it is just a smart investment.