Detaining immigrants is big business

Here's who is getting rich off Trump's immigrant detention camps.

A new Daily Beast investigation reveals new details about just how lucrative the business of detaining immigrant asylum-seekers in the United States has become.

"In 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what immigration advocates say uncomfortably resembles slave labor," write the Beast's Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley.

Excerpt from '$800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies' --

Being in the U.S. illegally is a misdemeanor offense, and immigration detention is technically a civil matter, not a criminal process. But the reality looks much different. The Daily Beast reported last month that as of Oct. 20, ICE was detaining an average of 44,631 people every day, an all-time high. Now ICE has told The Daily Beast that its latest detention numbers are even higher: 44,892 people as of Dec. 8. Its budget request for the current fiscal year anticipates detaining 52,000 people daily.

Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn't just policy; it's big business. Yesica's employer and jailer, the private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to President Trump's campaign and inaugural.

Pinning down the size and scope of the immigration prison industry is obscured by government secrecy. But the Daily Beast combed through ICE budget submissions and other public records to compile as comprehensive a list as possible of what for-profit prisons charge taxpayers to lock up a growing population, and how many people those facilities detain on average. The result: For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which The Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.

Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people-meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that's not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher.