ARRESTED IN AMERICA
SINCE ARRIVING IN OFFICE
in 2009, Obama has pushed
for legislation that would allow
most of the country’s 11.7 million
undocumented immigrants to remain here legally. But with a faction of House Republicans refusing to concede to the demands of
reformers, the president continues to oversee the deportation
of about a thousand immigrants
each day, insisting that he has
no choice but to enforce the law
as it’s written.
Between 2005 and 2012, the
rate of deportations doubled, and
although it declined in the last
year for the first time during his
tenure, Obama has already overseen nearly 2 million deportations, outpacing any other president in U.S. history.
As deportations have increased,
so have detentions. In 1994, the
government detained 82,000
people. By 2011, the most recent
year for which data are available,
according to the Department of
Homeland Security, that number
had climbed to 429,000.
Some immigration activists
and experts blame this rise on the
political influence of companies
like Corrections Corporation of
America, or CCA, a major operator
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
of private prisons, including the
Elizabeth facility and other immigrant detention centers around
the country. In the aftermath of
the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration shifted responsibility
for immigration enforcement from
the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the newly created
Activists in the immigration
reform movement, frustrated
by a lack of progress in Congress,
have called on Obama to use
his executive powers to stop
the detention and deportation
of undocumented people.
Department of Homeland Security
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls itself the “principal investigative arm” of DHS).
Accordingly, private prison companies began boosting their spending
on lobbying efforts aimed at influencing prison policy and securing
government contracts.
By the end of the decade, Congress had adopted a law requiring
ICE to keep an average of 34,000
people in detention at a time. As
immigration officers worked to
meet this “bed quota,” as the policy
is known in Washington, the private prison industry profited. Between 2005 and 2012, CCA and
The GEO Group, Inc., another giant