介绍:
4. For-Profit Immigration Detention Centers and Private Repatriation
Just as private entities--principally CCA and the GEO Group, Inc.107-- operate prisons on behalf of state and federal corrections departments,108 such entities also operate detention centers on behalf of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), housing undocumented *907 immigrants who are working their way through the immigration appeals process or awaiting deportation.109 Immigration detention is big business for private actors: “In fact, civil immigration detention is credited with saving the private prison industry from the brink of bankruptcy by forcing federal immigration authorities to seek additional space in which to house [detainees].”110
Private immigration detention centers include the Stewart Detention Center in southern Georgia (1,752 beds),111 the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey (300 beds),112 the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona (1,500 beds),113 and a facility near Otay Mesa, California, which opened in 2015 (1,482 beds).114 In a fascinating hybrid relationship, CCA also assumed responsibility for operations at the new South Texas Family Residential Center, a detention camp for undocumented female and child immigrants.115 However, this particular transaction did not involve a standard contract between CCA and the federal government.116 Instead, the facility is funded by ICE through payments to the town of Eloy, Arizona--Eloy channels the funds to CCA, which in turn pays Eloy for its accounting services.117 Ostensibly, the arrangement--an “Intergovernmental Services Agreement”--was designed to avoid competitive bidding requirements and speed up construction of the new facility.118
Private entities are also playing an increasingly significant role in deportation. Under federal law, hospitals that receive Medicare funding are required to attempt to stabilize all emergency patients regardless of their *908 immigration status.119 Yet the federal purse closes as soon as undocumented patients are deemed stable--and privately operated hospitals, unable to recoup often massive expenses associated with long-term care, are confronted with the option of “medically repatriating” these patients. Specifically, one study notes:
In an effort to save costs, and within the broader context of the privatization of immigration regulation and increasing immigration enforcement by local actors, many public and private hospitals take it on themselves to enforce the nation’s immigration laws by deporting desperately ill immigrants directly from their hospital beds. In this new frontier of privatized immigration enforcement, hospitals act unilaterally or in concert with private transport companies to deport seriously ill or catastrophically injured migrants.120
The authors of one study documented “over 800 cases of successful or attempted medical repatriation” between 2007 and 2013.121 Because the process “takes place in the shadows without any governmental regulation,”122 the actual number of such repatriations may be higher.
