According to Real Independent News & Film, “93% of the people who are locked up in the U.S. in order to meet the minimum legal requirements for the number of people who must be locked up on possible violations of U.S. immigration laws are locked in for-profit prisons, which are owned by corporations that heavily fund a few politicians, including Hillary Clinton.”
What’s more, approximately 34,000 immigrants are kept in detention each day in order to fulfill a quota that is set by Congress. Many immigrants who are locked up in detention are not guilty because they impose a threat to others, but simply because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) must maintain no less than 34,000 beds. The quota was brought into law in 2007, as told by the Nation.
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Eric Zuesse of RINF says,
“Consequently, U.S. immigration policies are highly shaped by corruption. Large corporations and their board members and their PACS don’t invest this money for nothing. They’re good at business. They’re buying policy, and the people who write and implement policy are basically their employees — just on the government’s payroll (and in order to get onto the government’s payroll, these politicians need those campaign contributions). After retirement from the government, government officials get hired by what libertarians naively call ‘the productive economy’ (other institutions that are as beholden to the big-money people as the government itself is). It’s like a person’s being hired by different subsidiaries of the same corporation.”
While Hilary Clinton has stated publicly that she would end private prison contracts, the presidential hopeful has come under fire for accepting $133,246 from prison lobbyists. During her husband’s term as president in the 1990s, a mass wave of black immigrants (Haitians, Africans, and Dominicans) were sent away under criminal deportations, and are detained and deported five times the rate of other populations of undocumented people.
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