The good news is that yesterday, the government announced that it would stop
federal contracts with private prison companies. This doesn't include the
detention of immigrants and also,, just how and when the contracts will stop
remains a bit foggy. But it is good news for federal prisoners.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 12:45 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: US Skipped Standard Bid Procedure in $1
Billion Deal With Prison Company
This article simply underscores what we already know. President Barak Obama
is a Corporate Lackey. Any protestations by himself are merely more Smoke
And Mirrors.
Would a "People's" leader turn to a private prison to help handle the
problems of the People?
The normal knee jerk reaction of a frightened Ruling Class is to clamp down
even harder on the Masses.
But any man who can continue approving the murder of thousands of decent
people around the world, and can still sleep at night, well that says it
all.
I wonder if Barak and Michelle Obama ever ask one another if their public
efforts have made the world safer for their daughters?
In my working class home, in my working class community, I'm not feeling too
certain that my grandchildren will not suffer as a result of Barak Obama's
inept leadership.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
surge.
Harlan writes: "As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two
years ago, the Obama administration skipped the standard public
bidding process and agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to
Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison
company, to build a massive detention facility for women and children
seeking asylum."
The entrance to the South Texas Residential Facility in Dilley, Texas,
subject of a $1 billion deal to provide detention facilities for
asylum seekers. (photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/WP)
US Skipped Standard Bid Procedure in $1 Billion Deal With Prison
Company By Chico Harlan, The Washington Post
15 August 16
As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the
Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and
agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections
Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison company, to build
a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum.
The four-year, $1 billion contract - details of which have not been
previously disclosed - has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual
arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained
at the facility. Critics say the government's policy has been
expensive but ineffective. Arrivals of Central American families at
the border have continued unabated while court rulings have forced the
administration to step back from its original approach to the border
In hundreds of other detention contracts given out by the U.S.officials.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, federal payouts rise and
fall in step with the percentage of beds being occupied. But in this
case, CCA is paid for 100 percent capacity even if the facility is,
say, half full, as it has been in recent months. An ICE spokeswoman,
Jennifer Elzea, said that the contracts for the 2,400-bed facility in
Dilley and one for a 532-bed family detention center in Karnes City,
Tex., given to another company, are "unique" in their payment
structures because they provide "a fixed monthly fee for use of the
entire facility regardless of the number of residents."
The rewards for CCA have been enormous: In 2015, the first full year
in which the South Texas Family Residential Center was operating, CCA
- which operates 74 facilities - made 14 percent of its revenue from
that one center while recording record profit. CCA declined to specify
the costs of operating the center.
"For the most part, what I see is a very expensive incarceration scheme,"
said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House's
Immigration and Border Security subcommittee. "It's costly to the
taxpayers and achieves almost nothing, other than trauma to already
traumatized individuals."
The Washington Post based this account on financial documents -
including copies of the agreements spelling out the Dilley deal
obtained from the National Immigrant Justice Center - and interviews
with government lawyers and former immigration and homeland security
CCA's chief executive, Damon Hininger, told investors in an earnings"preliminary stage."
call this month that ICE recently has begun pushing for a more
"cost-effective solution." Those discussions, he said, are in the
The facility in Dilley - built in the middle of sunbaked scrubland, inDilley.
what used to be a camp for oil workers - now holds the majority of the
country's mother-and-child detainees. Such asylum seekers, until two
years ago, had rarely been held in detention. They instead settled in
whatever town they chose, told to eventually appear in court. The
Obama administration's decision to transform that policy - pushed by
lawmakers assailing the porous state of the nation's border - shows
how the frenzy of America's immigration politics can also bolster a
private sector that benefits from a get-tough stance.
Before Dilley, CCA's revenue and profit had been flat for five years.
The United States' population of undocumented immigrants had begun to
fall, reversing a decades-long trend, and the White House was looking
to show greater leniency toward illegal immigrants already in the
country. But under pressure to demonstrate that it still took border
issues seriously, the administration took a tougher stance toward
newly arriving Central Americans.
"This was about the best thing that could happen to private detention
since sliced bread," said Laura Lichter, a Denver immigration and
asylum attorney who spent months living out of an old hunting lodge in
For the first years of the Obama administration, the United Statesfamily detention.
maintained fewer than 100 beds for family detention. But by the end of
2014, the administration had plans for more than 3,000 beds, and
immigration advocates said the ramp-up had broken with America's
tradition of welcoming those seeking a haven from violence. At the
Dilley facility, detainees described in interviews an understaffed
medical clinic and rampant sickness among children, among other
problems.
CCA, a Nashville-based public company valued at $3.18 billion,
declined interview requests for this story. The company declined to
respond to 28 of
31 written questions. It said that ICE oversees medical care at the
facility, and the agency said it was comfortable with the quality of care.
"CCA is committed to treating all individuals in our care with the
dignity and respect they deserve while they have due process before
immigration courts," the company said in a five-paragraph statement.
"Responding to pressing challenges such [as] this - and doing so in a
way that can flexibly meet the government's changing needs - is a role
that CCA has played for federal immigration partners for more than 30
years."
The Central American asylum seekers were coming mostly from three
countries in meltdown - El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras - where
gang and drug-related violence have grown so rampant that their murder
rates are now three of the world's five highest, according to U.N.
data. By claiming that they feared for their safety, the Central
Americans were not subject, as are other unauthorized migrants, to
ordinary deportation; they were entitled to press their asylum claims.
But Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who oversees ICE, heard
from border patrollers that the emergency was brewing
momentum: People kept coming because word was out that the United
States was granting permisos to new arrivals, allowing them to walk
right into the country.
According to lawmakers and administration officials, Johnson
determined that the United States could cut down the surge only by
demonstrating that asylum seekers wouldn't receive leniency. Johnson
won approval from the White House to explore ramping up family
detention for asylum seekers on a scale never before seen in America,
part of what he called an "aggressive deterrence strategy." He ordered
ICE to figure out a way to make it work.
"This whole thing [was] building and reaching an unsustainable level,"
said Christian Marrone, then Johnson's chief of staff. "We had to take
measures to stem the tide."
Fast action
In a matter of days, ICE patched together a temporary solution. In
June 2014, it placed the first batch of Central American mothers and
children at a law-enforcement training site in Artesia, N.M. The
agency pulled border agents off their usual jobs to help run the
facility, and it was wary of hiring new employees and building a
permanent facility for a problem it didn't know how long would last.
"It makes sense that you put some of the risk on a private company,"
said Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration
Studies, which favors stricter border control.
That's how ICE made the call to CCA.
The company, founded three decades earlier, had risen from
near-bankruptcy thanks to an immigrant detention boom that followed
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the following 15 years, the share of
revenue that CCA got from federal contracts more than doubled,
according to the company's annual reports. CCA and its only major
competitor, the GEO Group, operate nine of the 10 largest immigration
detention centers.
Through it all, CCA had pitched Washington on the idea that it could
be an antidote to big government spending. One of the company's
co-founders, Thomas Beasley, told Inc. magazine in 1988 that selling
prisons was no different from "selling cars, or real estate, or
hamburgers." But behind that pitch, CCA was a mega-sized business -
one that pays its chief executive $3.4 million and has on its payroll
a slew of former senior government officials.
Immigration activists say CCA had already proved itself incapable of
running a family detention center. Between 2006 and 2009 - the only
other major U.S.
attempt to house women and children seeking asylum - CCA ran a
facility in Taylor, Tex. Children wore prison uniforms, received
little education and were limited to one hour of play time per day,
according to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed against
ICE in 2007 that led months later to a settlement agreement and
improved conditions. Months after taking office, Obama closed the
facility.
At ICE, officials saw the reboot of family detention as a welcome, if
belated, sign of strength on the border. CCA was one of the two
companies with the "means" to pull it off, along with GEO, said Phil
Miller, an ICE deputy executive associate director who helps to oversee
It could build a new facility quickly and had a legion of staffmore.
members with the right security clearances. (GEO, which referred all
questions to ICE, ended up refurbishing a smaller facility.) In
forging their deal, CCA and ICE faced one major hurdle: the
requirement for a public bidding process - one that threatened to
significantly delay construction. So CCA found a workaround. In
September 2014, the company approached Eloy, Ariz., an interstate town
of 17,000, and asked its officials if they would be willing to amend
its existing contract with the town. The company had been operating a
detention center for undocumented men in Eloy since 2006. If Eloy
modified that contract - essentially, directing CCA to build a new
facility in another state, 1,000 miles away - the federal government
would be freed from the bidding process. And by reaching out to a town
already involved with the industry, CCA could also avoid the political
risks that often come when trying to convince a new locality to build
a detention center.
The deal is formed by two separate agreements: One between ICE and
Eloy, the other between Eloy and CCA. Both were signed on the same day
and refer to the family detention center in Dilley. As spelled out in
the contracts, ICE provides the money to Eloy; Eloy, in turn, receives
a small "administrative fee" for being party to the deal.
According to one Eloy official, county records and an account from the
time in a local newspaper, the Eloy Enterprise, a CCA executive
pitched the opportunity at a city council meeting in September 2014,
saying Eloy could profit from the deal by collecting the payout from
Washington, receiving a small percentage - roughly $1.8 million over
the four years - and then passing the rest to CCA.
"At the time, there was some reluctance because of the optics" to go
along with it, said Harvey Krauss, the Eloy city manager. "But I told
everybody, we're not taking a position; we're just a fiscal agent. The
federal government was in a hurry and this was an expedited way for
them to get it done."
ICE senior leaders signed off on the deal, an official at the agency said.
Mark Fleming, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center,
who has reviewed hundreds of federal ICE contracts, said the deal was
"singularly unique" and was designed to "avoid transparency." The
center obtained copies of the financial agreements through Arizona
open-records laws and gave them to The Post. Several other experts on
federal procurement said that while the government can avoid bidding
laws in urgent or national security cases, they had never before seen
a facility in one state created with the help of a recycled contract
from another.
"This is the arrangement of a no-bid contract by twisting and
distorting the procurement process past recognition," said Charles
Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law school professor, former
solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House of Representatives,
who reviewed the deal at the request of The Washington Post.
The contract shows how CCA is assured of a predictable payment,
collecting a fixed amount of around $20 million per month - even when
the facility's population drops.
A CCA spokesman, Jonathan Burns, said that the company is required by
the contract to provide full staffing and other services no matter the
population. But, from the government's perspective, the contract
becomes less cost-effective when fewer people stay in Dilley. When
2,400 people are detained, the government spends what amounts to $285
per day, per person, according to a Post calculation. When the
facility is half-full, as it has been in recent months, the government
would spend $570. On some days when the facility is nearly empty, as
it was for a period in January, the government would be paying multiples
At more than 200 non-family immigration detention sites, most persurge.
diems are between $60 and $85, according to an ICE document. The daily
cost to detain children is higher, ICE officials said, because the
government requires a litany of extra standards such as education
courses and medicine for nursing mothers.
Critics say ICE could have chosen much more cost-effective alternatives.
Ankle monitors, which could track asylum seekers as they await court
dates, for example, cost several dollars per day.
Miller, the ICE official, said his agency didn't push as hard as usual
for lower costs because of the "immediacy" of the need.
"If you need an air conditioner today, you're going to pay what the AC
guy tells you," Miller said. "If it's December and you want a new AC
unit in place by June, you have more time to research."
The deterrence issue
For the opening of the South Texas Family Residential Center on Dec.
15, 2014, Johnson flew to Dilley and announced that the country's
borders are "not open to illegal migration." A U.S. government ad
blitz in Central America spread a similar message.
But immigration activists cast doubt on whether the United States is
getting what it paid for: deterrence.
Border-crossing among asylum-seeking women and children has changed
little from two years ago. Over the previous 12 months, according to
government statistics, 66,000 "family units" - mostly women and
children - have been apprehended at the border, compared with 61,000
in the same period two years earlier.
"What is the root problem? I don't believe it's a pull factor so much
as a push," said John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director who left
in early 2014, months before the immigration surge. "I do not believe
that family detention has been a deterrent."
Initially, the government had intended Dilley to hold families for
months at a time. But that model has been changed by two court
decisions in 2015 - one determining that ICE couldn't detain asylum
seekers "simply to deter others," and one that the government had to
abide by a two-decade-old settlement requiring that migrant children
be held in the least restrictive environment possible. The judge in
that case, Dolly Gee, ordered the government to release children
"without unnecessary delay," and Homeland Security has so far been
unsuccessful in appealing.
As a result, stays at Dilley have shortened. Families are typically
released in a matter of weeks, after women pass an initial interview
establishing they have a "credible" reason to fear returning home.
Even when Dilley has many empty beds, families sometimes aren't
detained at all, according to immigration lawyers.
Use of the Dilley facility has become so "haphazard," said Ian
Philabaum, an advocacy coordinator, that in January it was nearly
empty, even as Central Americans were arriving at a steady pace along
the Texas border.
Government officials no longer say that the Dilley detention center is
for deterrence. But Johnson said at a recent roundtable with reporters
that family detention, though it had been "reformed considerably," had
still been useful for women and children while the government
determined whether they had health problems or posed flight risks.
"I think we need to continue the practice so we're not just engaging
in catch-and-release," Johnson said.
CCA declined to comment on the evolution of family detention policy.
But Hininger, CCA's chief executive, said in a release for investors
that the company was "pleased" with its performance at the start of
the year. Its increase in revenue, the company said, was "primarily
attributable" to the South Texas Family Residential Center.
Priscila Mosqueda contributed to this report.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
The entrance to the South Texas Residential Facility in Dilley, Texas,
subject of a $1 billion deal to provide detention facilities for
asylum seekers. (photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/WP)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/inside-the-administrat
ions-1
-billion-deal-to-detain-central-american-asylum-seekers/2016/08/14/e47
f1960-
5819-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/b
usines
s/economy/inside-the-administrations-1-billion-deal-to-detain-central-
americ
an-asylum-seekers/2016/08/14/e47f1960-5819-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_stor
y.html US Skipped Standard Bid Procedure in $1 Billion Deal With
Prison Company By Chico Harlan, The Washington Post
15 August 16
s Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the
Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and
agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections
Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison company, to build
a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum.
The four-year, $1 billion contract - details of which have not been
previously disclosed - has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual
arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained
at the facility. Critics say the government's policy has been
expensive but ineffective. Arrivals of Central American families at
the border have continued unabated while court rulings have forced the
administration to step back from its original approach to the border
In hundreds of other detention contracts given out by the U.S.officials.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, federal payouts rise and
fall in step with the percentage of beds being occupied. But in this
case, CCA is paid for 100 percent capacity even if the facility is,
say, half full, as it has been in recent months. An ICE spokeswoman,
Jennifer Elzea, said that the contracts for the 2,400-bed facility in
Dilley and one for a 532-bed family detention center in Karnes City,
Tex., given to another company, are "unique" in their payment
structures because they provide "a fixed monthly fee for use of the
entire facility regardless of the number of residents."
The rewards for CCA have been enormous: In 2015, the first full year
in which the South Texas Family Residential Center was operating, CCA
- which operates 74 facilities - made 14 percent of its revenue from
that one center while recording record profit. CCA declined to specify
the costs of operating the center.
"For the most part, what I see is a very expensive incarceration scheme,"
said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House's
Immigration and Border Security subcommittee. "It's costly to the
taxpayers and achieves almost nothing, other than trauma to already
traumatized individuals."
The Washington Post based this account on financial documents -
including copies of the agreements spelling out the Dilley deal
obtained from the National Immigrant Justice Center - and interviews
with government lawyers and former immigration and homeland security
CCA's chief executive, Damon Hininger, told investors in an earnings"preliminary stage."
call this month that ICE recently has begun pushing for a more
"cost-effective solution." Those discussions, he said, are in the
The facility in Dilley - built in the middle of sunbaked scrubland, inDilley.
what used to be a camp for oil workers - now holds the majority of the
country's mother-and-child detainees. Such asylum seekers, until two
years ago, had rarely been held in detention. They instead settled in
whatever town they chose, told to eventually appear in court. The
Obama administration's decision to transform that policy - pushed by
lawmakers assailing the porous state of the nation's border - shows
how the frenzy of America's immigration politics can also bolster a
private sector that benefits from a get-tough stance.
Before Dilley, CCA's revenue and profit had been flat for five years.
The United States' population of undocumented immigrants had begun to
fall, reversing a decades-long trend, and the White House was looking
to show greater leniency toward illegal immigrants already in the
country. But under pressure to demonstrate that it still took border
issues seriously, the administration took a tougher stance toward
newly arriving Central Americans.
"This was about the best thing that could happen to private detention
since sliced bread," said Laura Lichter, a Denver immigration and
asylum attorney who spent months living out of an old hunting lodge in
For the first years of the Obama administration, the United Statesfamily detention.
maintained fewer than 100 beds for family detention. But by the end of
2014, the administration had plans for more than 3,000 beds, and
immigration advocates said the ramp-up had broken with America's
tradition of welcoming those seeking a haven from violence. At the
Dilley facility, detainees described in interviews an understaffed
medical clinic and rampant sickness among children, among other
problems.
CCA, a Nashville-based public company valued at $3.18 billion,
declined interview requests for this story. The company declined to
respond to 28 of
31 written questions. It said that ICE oversees medical care at the
facility, and the agency said it was comfortable with the quality of care.
"CCA is committed to treating all individuals in our care with the
dignity and respect they deserve while they have due process before
immigration courts," the company said in a five-paragraph statement.
"Responding to pressing challenges such [as] this - and doing so in a
way that can flexibly meet the government's changing needs - is a role
that CCA has played for federal immigration partners for more than 30
years."
The Central American asylum seekers were coming mostly from three
countries in meltdown - El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras - where
gang and drug-related violence have grown so rampant that their murder
rates are now three of the world's five highest, according to U.N.
data. By claiming that they feared for their safety, the Central
Americans were not subject, as are other unauthorized migrants, to
ordinary deportation; they were entitled to press their asylum claims.
But Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who oversees ICE, heard
from border patrollers that the emergency was brewing
momentum: People kept coming because word was out that the United
States was granting permisos to new arrivals, allowing them to walk
right into the country.
According to lawmakers and administration officials, Johnson
determined that the United States could cut down the surge only by
demonstrating that asylum seekers wouldn't receive leniency. Johnson
won approval from the White House to explore ramping up family
detention for asylum seekers on a scale never before seen in America,
part of what he called an "aggressive deterrence strategy." He ordered
ICE to figure out a way to make it work.
"This whole thing [was] building and reaching an unsustainable level,"
said Christian Marrone, then Johnson's chief of staff. "We had to take
measures to stem the tide."
Fast action
In a matter of days, ICE patched together a temporary solution. In
June 2014, it placed the first batch of Central American mothers and
children at a law-enforcement training site in Artesia, N.M. The
agency pulled border agents off their usual jobs to help run the
facility, and it was wary of hiring new employees and building a
permanent facility for a problem it didn't know how long would last.
"It makes sense that you put some of the risk on a private company,"
said Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration
Studies, which favors stricter border control.
That's how ICE made the call to CCA.
The company, founded three decades earlier, had risen from
near-bankruptcy thanks to an immigrant detention boom that followed
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the following 15 years, the share of
revenue that CCA got from federal contracts more than doubled,
according to the company's annual reports. CCA and its only major
competitor, the GEO Group, operate nine of the 10 largest immigration
detention centers.
Through it all, CCA had pitched Washington on the idea that it could
be an antidote to big government spending. One of the company's
co-founders, Thomas Beasley, told Inc. magazine in 1988 that selling
prisons was no different from "selling cars, or real estate, or
hamburgers." But behind that pitch, CCA was a mega-sized business -
one that pays its chief executive $3.4 million and has on its payroll
a slew of former senior government officials.
Immigration activists say CCA had already proved itself incapable of
running a family detention center. Between 2006 and 2009 - the only
other major U.S.
attempt to house women and children seeking asylum - CCA ran a
facility in Taylor, Tex. Children wore prison uniforms, received
little education and were limited to one hour of play time per day,
according to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed against
ICE in 2007 that led months later to a settlement agreement and
improved conditions. Months after taking office, Obama closed the
facility.
At ICE, officials saw the reboot of family detention as a welcome, if
belated, sign of strength on the border. CCA was one of the two
companies with the "means" to pull it off, along with GEO, said Phil
Miller, an ICE deputy executive associate director who helps to oversee
It could build a new facility quickly and had a legion of staffmore.
members with the right security clearances. (GEO, which referred all
questions to ICE, ended up refurbishing a smaller facility.) In
forging their deal, CCA and ICE faced one major hurdle: the
requirement for a public bidding process - one that threatened to
significantly delay construction. So CCA found a workaround. In
September 2014, the company approached Eloy, Ariz., an interstate town
of 17,000, and asked its officials if they would be willing to amend
its existing contract with the town. The company had been operating a
detention center for undocumented men in Eloy since 2006. If Eloy
modified that contract - essentially, directing CCA to build a new
facility in another state, 1,000 miles away - the federal government
would be freed from the bidding process. And by reaching out to a town
already involved with the industry, CCA could also avoid the political
risks that often come when trying to convince a new locality to build
a detention center.
The deal is formed by two separate agreements: One between ICE and
Eloy, the other between Eloy and CCA. Both were signed on the same day
and refer to the family detention center in Dilley. As spelled out in
the contracts, ICE provides the money to Eloy; Eloy, in turn, receives
a small "administrative fee" for being party to the deal.
According to one Eloy official, county records and an account from the
time in a local newspaper, the Eloy Enterprise, a CCA executive
pitched the opportunity at a city council meeting in September 2014,
saying Eloy could profit from the deal by collecting the payout from
Washington, receiving a small percentage - roughly $1.8 million over
the four years - and then passing the rest to CCA.
"At the time, there was some reluctance because of the optics" to go
along with it, said Harvey Krauss, the Eloy city manager. "But I told
everybody, we're not taking a position; we're just a fiscal agent. The
federal government was in a hurry and this was an expedited way for
them to get it done."
ICE senior leaders signed off on the deal, an official at the agency said.
Mark Fleming, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center,
who has reviewed hundreds of federal ICE contracts, said the deal was
"singularly unique" and was designed to "avoid transparency." The
center obtained copies of the financial agreements through Arizona
open-records laws and gave them to The Post. Several other experts on
federal procurement said that while the government can avoid bidding
laws in urgent or national security cases, they had never before seen
a facility in one state created with the help of a recycled contract
from another.
"This is the arrangement of a no-bid contract by twisting and
distorting the procurement process past recognition," said Charles
Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law school professor, former
solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House of Representatives,
who reviewed the deal at the request of The Washington Post.
The contract shows how CCA is assured of a predictable payment,
collecting a fixed amount of around $20 million per month - even when
the facility's population drops.
A CCA spokesman, Jonathan Burns, said that the company is required by
the contract to provide full staffing and other services no matter the
population. But, from the government's perspective, the contract
becomes less cost-effective when fewer people stay in Dilley. When
2,400 people are detained, the government spends what amounts to $285
per day, per person, according to a Post calculation. When the
facility is half-full, as it has been in recent months, the government
would spend $570. On some days when the facility is nearly empty, as
it was for a period in January, the government would be paying multiples
At more than 200 non-family immigration detention sites, most per
diems are between $60 and $85, according to an ICE document. The daily
cost to detain children is higher, ICE officials said, because the
government requires a litany of extra standards such as education
courses and medicine for nursing mothers.
Critics say ICE could have chosen much more cost-effective alternatives.
Ankle monitors, which could track asylum seekers as they await court
dates, for example, cost several dollars per day.
Miller, the ICE official, said his agency didn't push as hard as usual
for lower costs because of the "immediacy" of the need.
"If you need an air conditioner today, you're going to pay what the AC
guy tells you," Miller said. "If it's December and you want a new AC
unit in place by June, you have more time to research."
The deterrence issue
For the opening of the South Texas Family Residential Center on Dec.
15, 2014, Johnson flew to Dilley and announced that the country's
borders are "not open to illegal migration." A U.S. government ad
blitz in Central America spread a similar message.
But immigration activists cast doubt on whether the United States is
getting what it paid for: deterrence.
Border-crossing among asylum-seeking women and children has changed
little from two years ago. Over the previous 12 months, according to
government statistics, 66,000 "family units" - mostly women and
children - have been apprehended at the border, compared with 61,000
in the same period two years earlier.
"What is the root problem? I don't believe it's a pull factor so much
as a push," said John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director who left
in early 2014, months before the immigration surge. "I do not believe
that family detention has been a deterrent."
Initially, the government had intended Dilley to hold families for
months at a time. But that model has been changed by two court
decisions in 2015 - one determining that ICE couldn't detain asylum
seekers "simply to deter others," and one that the government had to
abide by a two-decade-old settlement requiring that migrant children
be held in the least restrictive environment possible. The judge in
that case, Dolly Gee, ordered the government to release children
"without unnecessary delay," and Homeland Security has so far been
unsuccessful in appealing.
As a result, stays at Dilley have shortened. Families are typically
released in a matter of weeks, after women pass an initial interview
establishing they have a "credible" reason to fear returning home.
Even when Dilley has many empty beds, families sometimes aren't
detained at all, according to immigration lawyers.
Use of the Dilley facility has become so "haphazard," said Ian
Philabaum, an advocacy coordinator, that in January it was nearly
empty, even as Central Americans were arriving at a steady pace along
the Texas border.
Government officials no longer say that the Dilley detention center is
for deterrence. But Johnson said at a recent roundtable with reporters
that family detention, though it had been "reformed considerably," had
still been useful for women and children while the government
determined whether they had health problems or posed flight risks.
"I think we need to continue the practice so we're not just engaging
in catch-and-release," Johnson said.
CCA declined to comment on the evolution of family detention policy.
But Hininger, CCA's chief executive, said in a release for investors
that the company was "pleased" with its performance at the start of
the year. Its increase in revenue, the company said, was "primarily
attributable" to the South Texas Family Residential Center.
Priscila Mosqueda contributed to this report.
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