Pedro Guzman is shown at home in Durham, N.C. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the Guatemalan native in 2009, and he spent 19 months in private prisons run by CCA in Gainesville and Lumpkin, Ga. Guzman was released and granted legal permanent residency in May, when ICE’s Board of Immigration Appeals overturned his deportation order.By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ and GARANCE BURKE
Associated Press
MIAMI – Locking up illegal immigrants has grown profoundly lucrative for the private prisons industry, a reliable pot of revenue that helped keep some of the biggest companies in business.
And while nearly half of the 400,000 immigrants held annually are housed in private facilities, the federal government – which spends $2 billion a year on keeping those people in custody – says it isn’t necessarily cheaper to outsource the work, a central argument used for privatization in the first place.
The Associated Press, seeking to tally the scope of the private facilities, add up their cost and the amounts the companies spend on lobbying and campaign donations, reviewed more than 10 years’ worth of federal and state records. It found a complex, mutually beneficial and evidently legal relationship between those who make corrections and immigration policy and a few prison companies. Some of those companies were struggling to survive before toughened immigrant detention laws took effect.