Intelligence Bill Signals Boon for Immigrant Incarceration Industry

[struggle4progress]

by Bob Libal
February 20, 2005

The recently passed Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) will intensify a crisis in immigrant communities while benefiting a burgeoning immigrant incarceration industry.

Amongst other things, the omnibus bill, passed in December 2004, consolidates the nation’s intelligence programs into a National Intelligence Program, creates a Director of National Intelligence, and increases border enforcement. <snip>

However, one of the bill’s largely overlooked provisions authorizes 40,000 new immigrant detention beds by 2010. That triples the current immigrant detention system continuing an assault on immigrant communities started in the Clinton administration and intensified since the 9/11 attacks.

Only a handful of the current 22,000 immigrant detainees are suspected of any connection to terrorism. In fact, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, before 1996’s Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed as few as 4,000 immigrants were detained on a given day. Most of the newly detained are either asylum seekers or “criminal aliens” – immigrants convicted of crimes, anything as low as shoplifting or minor drug possession charges – who are awaiting deportation hearings. <snip>

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=7278