Reminder: Corporations Are Profiting Off Of Migrant Detention
The stories being reported from our country’s Southern border are horrifying. It is worth remembering that two corporations are profiting handsomely off of the current administration’s callous and inhumane policies. CoreCivic and GEO Group are the two largest providers of private prison and detention centers in the country.
In April, a lawsuit was filed against CoreCivic, alleging that the corporation is making millions in profit off of forced labor of migrants detained at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. The detainees are paid a meager wage of between $1 and $4 a day.
The lawsuit further alleges that detainees are deprived of basic necessities — like food, toilet paper, or soap — and must work for the ability to purchase those items from Stewart’s commissary. If they refuse to work, they are threatened with solitary confinement, or further withholding of necessities.
The plaintiffs, represented by a coalition of civil rights groups and lawyers, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and Project South, include Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a detainees currently incarcerated at Stewart.
“When I arrived at Stewart I was faced with the impossible choice — either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food,” Barrientos wrote in a statement released to CNN in April.
“If I didn’t work,” Barrientos continued, “I would never be able to call my family.”
A joint investigation from Reveal Center for Investigative Reporting and WABE reveals more about the inhumane conditions at Stewart. Reporters obtained federal records showing that Stewart is experiencing critical staffing shortages as well as an influx of drugs. Two detainees have died in a 12 month period; one who died by hanging himself with a bed sheet while being held in solitary confinement, and the other from complications from pneumonia.
Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, sent a letter to several members of Congress last week, calling on them to “end an unjust detention system that sends immigrants far from their families and friends, subordinates their well-being to the profit of others, and strips them of their rights.”
Similar lawsuits and allegations are cropping up at detention centers owned by CoreCivic around the country. Last month, a group of men issued a statement detailing the severe abuses and mistreatment that they are subject to inside Otay Mesa Detention Center, outside of San Diego. “They force us to work for 6 hours for a payment of $1.50,” the letter reads. They also claim that they are threatened to be sent before a Judge when they refuse to work. The letter is signed by 37 detainees.
Any modicum of profit motive is poison to a system which seeks to humanely detain people. The basic civic responsibility of the justice system cannot be held hostage by corporate executives, city budgets, or stockholders.