“Because of the scale of enforcement, the numbers of people who are interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are just enormous right now,” said Jacqueline Stevens, one of the researchers and a political science professor at Northwestern University.4 She concluded that “a low but persistent” percentage of the nearly 400,000 people held for deportation each year are in fact citizens. Because an overwhelming number of these detainees, American or not, offer no physical threat to anyone, they’re a perfect crop for prison corporations seeking to harvest custodial fees. For companies that lock people up for cash, the least troublesome inmates are the most profitable.
In December 2009 an Arizona legislator looking to crack down on nondocumented aliens took his idea not to the Arizona statehouse floor, but to an ALEC meeting at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. “I did a presentation,” State Senator Russell Pearce told National Public Radio. “I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, ‘Yeah.’” The approximately fifty people in attendance, mostly businesspeople and legislators, included officials of CCA, according to two sources who were there. The group decided to turn the immigration idea into a model bill that could be introduced in state legislatures around the country. Members discussed and debated language. The final, approved policy was to boost private prison income by requiring local cops to lock up gardeners, housemaids, and field-workers. Although they did not explicitly say so, racial profiling would be the straw that stirred the drink.5 (Pearce, who would become a key participant at Tea Party rallies, was voted out of office in November 2011 in a special recall election. He was defeated by the less-strident Republican Jerry Lewis.)
The next year CCA said that it expected to bring in “a significant portion of our revenues” from ICE, an agency it considered a barely tapped earnings source.6 The ALEC draft was transformed into SB 1070, an Arizona bill that instructed local constables to round up suspects who might lack appropriate legal documents. Targets were deemed guilty (and held in custody) until proved innocent.
The state’s Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, had routinely vetoed right-wing legislation like SB 1070 since she had taken office in January 2003. In fact, in April 2008 she’d vetoed similar immigration legislation that would, she said, have been an unfunded mandate. Back in 2005, she set a single session record of fifty-eight vetoes, and in her six years as governor she had vetoed 180 pieces of legislation that, for example, curtailed the right to abortion, radically promoted the carrying of guns, and turned the state into a sort of quasichurch. But at the end of 2008 President-elect Obama, seemingly oblivious to the effect it might have on Arizona, named Napolitano his secretary of homeland security. Napolitano had backed Obama against Hillary Clinton in January 2008, a crucial point during the Democratic fight for the presidential nomination. To accept her new job in Washington, she resigned two years before the end of her second term. Arizona has no lieutenant governor, so an empty governor’s chair is automatically filled by the secretary of state, in this case, Republican right-wing ideologue Jan Brewer. She would later gain notoriety as the seemingly crazed woman caught on camera pointing her finger in the president’s face during a private argument on an airport tarmac. If you closed your eyes, you could almost hear the ghosts of Lyndon Johnson and Tip O’Neill wailing as Obama voluntarily surrendered a governor’s mansion to the opposition party.
Brewer, the new governor, signed the immigration bill in April 2010. It was most unlikely that officials would ask Anglo-Saxons for their citizenship papers, whereas other U.S. citizens, particularly Hispanics, were clearly at risk under the new law. As the Arizona immigration law was being tested in the courts, the ACLU found that toward the end of 2010 approximately three thousand suspected illegal immigrants were detained in the state on any given day, a 58 percent increase over the previous six years.7 The Arizona detainees accounted for 10 percent of the total U.S. detainee population.
A remarkably successful ad used to point out that you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Jewish rye bread. Neither do you have to be nondocumented to be arrested for having insufficient documentation of your residential status. In fact, you don’t even have to be in Arizona. Ask college student Romy Campos, a Florida native who was jailed four days on an immigration detainer in November 2011 after she was arrested in Torrance, California, on a minor misdemeanor charge.8 Denied bail, Campos was transferred to the Los Angeles County Jail. A public defender told her he was powerless to lift the federal detainer. Finally, an ACLU attorney provided her birth certificate. “I just felt violated by my own country,” said Campos, who was deemed guilty until proved innocent.
ALEC’s grab for a piece of the business of detaining immigration suspects devolved into a sloppy process that hurt right-wing legislators in the November 2012 election. Afterward, Republican leaders publicly declared their intention to mend fences with Hispanic voters. The abrasive policy embraced by ALEC and its Republican allies represents the sort of shortsighted thinking corporate executives employ when they exchange long-term profits and stability for short-term quick bucks and bonuses.
In October 2011 the state of Alabama took the Arizona immigration initiative into coarser territory, implementing a law with “the most draconian and oppressive set of provisions that this country, which claims to be the bastion of liberties and rights, has seen since the era of segregation,” according to the UK’s Guardian. “Within hours,” the Guardian reported, the new law “has claimed its first victims—from the detention of a man who later turned out to be residing legally, to the massive fleeing of migrant workers and school children, to even cutting off water services to families or individuals who can’t prove their legal status…. It is not clear yet how many have been or will be arrested under this provision, but the number will surely make one sector happy: private detention facilities.”9
The Alabama legislation included retribution against anyone doing business with undocumented residents. Providing them electricity or selling them a vehicle could be viewed as criminal acts. This meant that more inmates were headed to private detention centers inside the state, such as the one operated in Decatur by LCS Corrections Services. The law would “feed an already bloated national private prison system controlled by two major corporations, CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO group, which have a combined profit of more than $5 billion a year,” said the Guardian. CCA was running the largest private facility in the nation in neighboring Georgia and would probably take in many of the Alabama detainees. The Guardian article continued, “Charging $200 a night, this is an opportunity they’ll jump at.”10
As immigrant laborers began fleeing the state, John McMillan, its agriculture commissioner, proposed that the farm work they left behind be commissioned to inmate labor.11 The result, which didn’t seem to bother McMillan, was to transform paid workers into jailed workers, toiling at their previous occupations for a fraction of their old wages. In one sense the law and had opened a new gate to institutional slavery, or as the Guardian saw it, “another round of shame.”12 Old habits die hard, particularly when they’re viewed as profitable.