Search Results for: cca

CCA earns $36 million from family detention

The nation’s largest private prison contractor, Corrections Corporation of America, is heavily invested in all manner of detention at the state and federal level. Last year it added to its long running and extensive relationship with the federal government a sizeable contract to detain migrants traveling in family units. In a press release issued last week, CCA reported that this newest feature of its detention business is reaping substantial financial rewards. The company received $36.0 million in revenue from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas during the first quarter [...]

Largest private prison company, CCA, maintains strong immigration business

Following last week’s blogging about the GEO Group’s impressive immigration detention business, I thought I would follow up with an assessment of how its major competitor, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), is doing. With 92,000 beds at its disposal, CCA is the largest private prison company operating in the United States, and bills itself as the fifth largest correctional system in the country trailing only the federal government and three states. CCA has a long history of involvement with immigration detention. One of the country’s first two private prisons was an immigration [...]

SCOTUS: Vehicle flight is violent felony under ACCA

It took less than twenty-four hours before my brother Carlos Moctezuma García, one-half (along with my other brother Raúl) of García & García Law and patrocinador of this blog, fielded a question about whether last week’s Supreme Court decision holding that vehicle flight constitutes a violent felony under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) applies to the crime of violence type of aggravated felony. See Sykes v. United States, No. 09-11311, slip op. (June 9, 2011) (Kennedy wrote for Roberts, Breyer, Alito, Sotomayor; Thomas concurring in the judgment; Scalia dissented; Kagan dissented [...]

The Great Writ’s Elusive Promise

By Mary Holper In two recent cases, Reid v. Donelan and Brito v. Barr, a federal court in Massachusetts limited ICE’s power to detain people. But by requiring detained immigrants to file habeas corpus petitions to get a bond hearing in immigration court, Chief Judge Saris of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts undercut the strength of her own clear-sighted analysis. Reid and Brito are both class actions challenging immigration detention. For Reid class members, they must file a habeas corpus petition arguing that their detention under a 1996 mandatory detention statute, [...]

Border realities

In the pitched battles over immigration, rhetorical binaries dominate. Republicans refer to migrants as aliens. Democrats trumpet innocent children traumatized by extremist Trump-era practices. Migrants are either good or they’re bad, and in the imaginations of politicians and pundits, it’s possible to put some people into one category and other people into the other. Where talking points end, laws and policies begin. Under the illusion that people can easily be boxed, immigration law assigns privileges and sets law enforcement priorities based on markers of undesirability. Born in [...]

In 8 years, inspectors found 7,000 policy violations in ICE detention centers

ICE’s sprawling detention network sometimes appears to operate on nothing more than personal whims, but there are actually written standards that the agency requires its facilities to meet. ICE and its private prison operators routinely fail to do so. During the eight-year period spanning October 1, 2010 to August 1, 2018, internal and external auditors hired by ICE raised almost 7,000 instances of policy violations. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I obtained a list of every Uniform Corrective Action Plan created anytime a facility operated by or on behalf of ICE was found to [...]

From family detention to family separation

Separating families, as a Trump administration policy now requires when migrants try to sneak into the United States, is certainly cruel. Forgotten in the ruckus dominating immigration debates since last month’s policy announcement is the Obama administration’s embrace of an equally troubling alternative: locking up migrant children alongside their mothers. Losing sight of common threads between family separation and family detention runs the risk of missing an opportunity to reimagine immigration policies. In early May, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that federal [...]

Abolish the ICE Prison Complex

Locking up migrants fighting to stay in the United States is permissible, the Supreme Court reiterated in February. The Court’s ruling mocks justice, but isn’t a big surprise. The federal laws under the Court’s consideration breathe life into a mean-spirited immigration law enforcement regime that holds tightly to the misguided belief that migrants pose a threat that prisons are best suited to extinguish. In Jennings v. Rodriguez, five justices overturned the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowing migrants detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [...]