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Donald Trump Is Enacting His Darkest Agenda in the Backyard of a Small Town. Absolutely No One Wants to Talk About It.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Jena, Louisiana, population 4,000, would like to be known for its youth. Its youth softball team, specifically. Football is important too: This is the South, after all, and Jena High School put a player into the NFL not that long ago. But the first road sign on the two-lane highway announcing your arrival in the town name-checks only the Lady Giants, the 2021 state champions. By mid-March of this year, the varsity Jena Lady Giants had hopes of another state title in view. The team did nothing but win that week, mostly blowouts: 11–1, 15–1. On March 13, it went on the road and won 12–2. That same afternoon, back in Jena, a crowd filled up the local theater, the Strand. Attendees were there not for softball but for another institution that defines the town. Inside was the first community relations luncheon of the year with the GEO Group, the nation's largest operator of private prisons. To get to the event, cars came up through Jena's main thoroughfare, Oak Street, a nod to the city's once great timber industry. They passed a McDonald's on one side and a Dollar General on the other. They passed many American flags, draped outside businesses on both sides of the street, and pulled up to the intersection with the theater, which was marked by a road sign with a quote from the Bible: Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU SHALL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. Up the road just 3 miles farther, past Jena High School and out into the woods, would have come upon the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, run by the GEO Group. It is the ninth-largest immigration detention center in the country, and about 1,180 men are held there on any given day. But this afternoon, as it did once every three months, GEO was coming down to them. The mood in the Strand was light, positive. These meetings tended to be. The townspeople, mostly parish leaders and local businesspeople, sat down for lunch, which was catered and free. GEO was no stranger to Jena, and Jena no stranger to GEO. They'd been partners for years, back before the Jena facility had been retrofitted for immigrant detention, back before GEO was even called GEO. Now the facility was one of the largest employers in the area: 250 jobs. It was also one of the region's biggest taxpayers. The remote facility had grown into a central node in a newly established network of immigrant detention centers that span central Louisiana. Immigration advocates refer to this region as 'the black hole,' a place where people disappear into overcrowded detention, sometimes for years, often without ever seeing a lawyer or being convicted of a crime. Others are whisked onto deportation flights, headed for countries they've fled or never been to. One place where people who have been brought to Jena rarely end up is back at their American homes, in the lives they were living before agents banged on their front doors or raided their workplaces or pulled them over for a traffic stop. In the theater, the townspeople ate and listened to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center's administrator, Shad Rice, speak. He donned a black blazer over a black T-shirt, a GEO logo on the chest. It was all positive at first. He said pleasantries. He rattled off a list of promotions back at GEO corporate. The business environment was good. Often these meetings brought news of pay increases. But there was also something serious to address: The Jena facility had a new, high-profile detainee, one that some members of the audience may have heard about on the news. His name was Mahmoud Khalil. The 1,000-plus men warehoused up at CLIPC were almost always nameless, faceless—here today, gone tomorrow, or not, but certainly never heard from. Now there was a national figure, a Columbia University graduate student who had been shipped more than 1,300 miles down from New York because of his pro-Palestine activism. Other college students, political prisoners from far-flung American campuses, were not far behind: Alireza Doroudi, of the University of Alabama, would soon be hauled hundreds of miles to be deposited in Jena. Rumeysa Ozturk, of Tufts, would pass through too. Rice went into some detail about Khalil's case: He was an organizer at Columbia, activism that the Jena Times would later characterize as 'involvement in a significant protest at Columbia University, which led to the revocation of his green card and subsequent arrest for removal processing.' Even President Donald Trump, Rice noted, had been involved in the matter. Their sleepy town, their local detention center, was national news, and might continue to be. This was nothing to worry about, he said. Maybe the opposite: The Trump administration had pledged record deportations, and that had already resulted in record numbers for GEO. 'Compared to last year this time, we've conducted and had 5,000 more detainees processed through Alexandria's staging facility,' he said, referring to the airport, nearly 40 miles away, that ICE and GEO were using for deportation flights. 'So, in just three months, that's 5,000 more than last year at this point in time. That's quite the accomplishment for the staff down there.' Many of those detainees were being run on buses to and from Jena. The townspeople finished their meal. It was not uncommon for these meetings to be punctuated by grand gestures. Sometimes it was money for the nursing home or the council on aging, or scholarship money for local high school students. At the previous luncheon, Rice had pledged to send GEO employees Christmas caroling across town; he even gave Mayor LaDawn Edwards $300. This time, Rice pulled out a check for $1,000, for the Strand Theatre. Sheila Mason, the venue's representative, went up to receive it. The two posed, smiling, for a photo. 'Thank you very much for your support and allowing us to use the facility when we come up and have these events. It makes for a much nicer area for us to all come together,' Rice said. Out in town, most claimed to be unaware of what was brewing at the GEO facility. When I visited, I found the hard way that the people here don't like to talk about what goes on down the road. But it turned out their famous new visitor wasn't going anywhere—and that this was far from the first time the national spotlight had arrived here. The people of Jena had practice. By the late 1990s, if Jena was known nationally, it was known for its youth—its youth detention, specifically. Before, Jena had had oil. But oil went bust in the 1980s, and so Jena did what towns all across Louisiana did: It built a prison. The prison, run by Wackenhut Corrections Corporation—a precursor of GEO—was a 276-bed juvenile detention center called the Jena Juvenile Justice Center. Opened in 1998, it was, allegedly, state of the art. It was barely a year old when, in March 2000, the Clinton administration sued the state of Louisiana and Jena Juvenile Justice Center both, filing for emergency relief. According to a Justice Department correspondence, kids in Jena were 'subjected to excessive abuse and neglect' at the facility, including 'dangerous and life-threatening conditions.' The DOJ demanded that Wackenhut 'stop using corporal punishment, excessive force, and gas grenades; develop and implement an adequate response to the violence at Jena,' and more. Youth at the facility were 'being deprived of food, clothing and medical care and were routinely beaten by guards.' In April 2000, Wackenhut shook on a deal with the DOJ to address these concerns. A few days later, it thought better of it and decided to close the facility entirely. A month later, in May 2000, it was empty. Then, in 2005, came Hurricane Katrina. Soon after the hurricane hit, New Orleans–area prisons were evacuated due to flooding, and Jena was hastily reopened by the state to house relocated inmates. It was staffed by corrections officers from other state prisons, as well as some correctional officers on loan from Rikers Island, in New York City. The abuse reportedly started back up immediately. Inmates were 'slapped, punched, beaten, stripped naked, hit with belts, and kicked by corrections officers,' read a 2006 National Prison Project report. 'Deputies came in with dogs, riot gear, etc., beating inmates down, forcing us to the floor face down,' wrote Keith M. Dillon, who was transferred there, in a later testimony. 'I saw a LaSalle deputy slam a guy from Annex D in Jefferson Parish face down into the floor, knock two of his teeth out, then make him lick up his own blood. I could hear them beating people, people yelling, and if you looked up you got beat. After about 6 hours face down freezing, they started shaving our heads.' By October 2005, word had gotten out. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times helped put a withering spotlight on Jena. The Louisiana Department of Corrections decided to close the facility and disperse its inmates elsewhere rather than pursue an investigation. The Bush administration declined to investigate. The facility remained empty, and Wackenhut had by then rebranded, becoming GEO. Then, in August 2007, GEO made an announcement: Rather than continuing to lose money on the vacant, beleaguered, and notorious Jena facility, it would be expanding it. In a press release, the company announced it was adding 744 beds to the 416 beds already in existence, good for 1,160 in total by early 2008. 'GEO is actively marketing all 1,160 beds to state and federal detention agencies around the country,' it declared. The marketing was a success. Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency barely 4 years old at the time, signed a deal shortly thereafter. Around the same time, Jena was back in the national news for its youth again—not its youth detention center but its namesake public high school. A year earlier, nooses had been hung from a tree at Jena High School after some Black students sat beneath it. (The tree was most commonly a purlieu for white students.) In the subsequent weeks, fighting ensued. One white student pulled a gun, and other white students smashed bottles over the head of a Black student. That Black student and a group of his friends beat up a white student and knocked him unconscious. In the end, the Black students were arrested—the Jena Six, they were soon called—and charged with attempted murder. It became a national flashpoint. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said Jena 'reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African Americans.' Al Sharpton claimed that it was the new frontier of the Civil Rights Movement. The people of overwhelmingly white Jena did not take so kindly to being called racist. Craig Franklin, then assistant editor of the Jena Times, said it had all been a misunderstanding: The nooses were 'a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team,' he wrote. The insistence probably made it worse. Sharpton called for action, and he got it: In late September 2007, an estimated 20,000 protesters from all over the country descended on Jena. The town closed up its shops, shuttered up its school board, and braced for the flood. For a day, protesters, among them Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King III, overwhelmed the few streets. Celebrities from David Bowie to Ice Cube pledged support. Three of the Jena Six got their charges reduced, but all six eventually pleaded or were found guilty. The protesters left. A few months later in town, a group of white separatists rallied against Martin Luther King Jr. Day beneath a waving Ku Klux Klan flag, but that barely registered. Jena slipped back beneath national attention. Then the ICE facility opened. ICE detention was an even quieter business than criminal lockup, its detainees more transitory, with fewer rights than those in the criminal justice system. It was uncommon for word of anything to get down into town, rarer still for it to reach people beyond the parish. But after a few years, reports of mistreatment started back up again. In the first six months of 2016, three immigrants died in detention inside the Jena facility, all in separate incidents. In March 2017, another man died in detention, of cardiac arrest. One month after that, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement found that the facility was one of the top five immigration jails nationally in terms of sexual assault incidents reported. ('GEO strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding the services we provide,' a company spokesperson said in a statement. 'These allegations are part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government's immigration facility contractors.') During these years, after those deaths, Walter E. Dorroh Jr., the president of the LaSalle Economic Development District in Jena, made a rare public statement about the facility. 'GEO is the largest taxpayer of ad valorem taxes and one of the largest employers in our parish. But more important than the numbers is the intangible quality that GEO has brought to this parish. GEO is an impeccable corporate neighbor,' he wrote in a statement honoring the 10-year anniversary of the facility's conversion to immigrant detention. LaDawn Edwards, Jena's mayor, issued a public comment, also in celebration of the facility's first decade. 'The GEO Group is one of the town's largest employers and is a great asset to not only Jena, but the whole parish and surrounding area,' she said. In 2021 a study by Tulane University's Immigrants' Rights Clinic found 'prolonged and punitive' detention of immigrants who land in Jena, with little hope of winning release. In 2022 Edwards designated the first week of May 'National Correctional Employee Week.' And so it went, until April 11 of this year, when protesters returned to Jena. Then the protesters came back on April 15. It was happening again. 'Another group of people from out of town and out of state descended upon the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena last week,' wrote Franklin, since promoted to editor of the Jena Times, in the subsequent week's paper. 'They staged their protest in the ditch across the road from the facility's main entrance.' He added, 'There were no residents of LaSalle Parish at the demonstration. 'Who is Mahmoud Khalil?' Franklin asked in his article. 'He married his wife, Noor Abdalla in New York in 2023, the same year that Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, slaughtering babies, committing sexual violence, burning whole families alive and taking 240 civilians hostage. In total, over 1,200 Israelis were murdered on that day.' For nearly two decades, Jena had carried on far from the national eye. Its ICE facility had attracted federal contract money and better-than-minimum-wage employment and precious little scrutiny. About 91 percent of its population had voted for Trump. The out-of-town protesters were gone from Jena by the time I arrived. Things were getting back to normal. Easter was approaching. That Saturday, four men marched from one end of Jena to the other, trailing wooden crosses to commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus. I went to the ICE facility and saw it first. As I drove away, I stopped by the road to figure out directions. Not a full minute had passed before I saw a Jena police car headed toward me, in the opposite direction. I wondered where he might be going; I shouldn't have. He flipped a U-turn, pulled up close behind me, and rolled down the window. Where did I think I was going? I flashed a thumbs-up, hoping to wave him off. Again, he asked: 'What are you doing?' 'Just double-checking my directions back into town,' I said. 'There's only one road,' he barked back. The policeman tailed me the entire way back to town. I drove slowly. It took two separate visits to the police department to get anyone to speak with me beyond that. Assistant Chief David Smith initially told me that the officer with press training wasn't in. When I returned a day later, he confessed that he was actually that officer. I asked if he had seen the busloads of record transfers coming up from the airport in Alexandria, the ones GEO had celebrated in the quarterly luncheon, that by necessity had to traverse through Jena to arrive at the facility. 'They don't have to come through town,' he said. 'We don't know who's who. There are so many facilities.' I asked about how often the police were up at the facility: 'We're never out there,' he said. 'We don't see that.' About the conditions in detention: 'Nothing we can really tell you.' About the recent detentions of college students: 'They don't tell us anything. We don't own the facility.' About Jena's role in the greater immigrant detention infrastructure: 'Even if I knew, I probably wouldn't tell you,' he said. 'We hunt, we fish, we go to work, we play softball, like any small town.' It took two separate visits to the offices of the Jena Times to get a meeting with the editor, Franklin. He declined to speak with me, then he proceeded to continue talking to me. 'This is a conservative newspaper,' he said. 'We have an agenda.' He gestured at a flat-screen TV in his office that was playing Fox News. 'We watch Fox News.' He walked out of his office, headed for a meeting, he said, and I followed. 'This is a Trump town—we went 90–10 for Trump. The issue is black and white. If you break the rules, that's what happens,' he said, referring to the ICE facility. 'This is a very moral community,' he added, his voice getting louder. 'If there was anything wrong with the facility, the community would object to it, but they don't.' I made three separate efforts to meet with Edwards, the mayor. I sent an email; no response. I went in on a Wednesday, and she was in a meeting. I was told to leave my name and number and expect a call. No call came. I returned the next afternoon—meeting again. I was encouraged to come back later. No thanks, I said: I'd wait. I sat in the lobby, staring at a painted portrait of Edwards on the wall, platinum blond bob on a teal background. Two hours went by. I checked in with the receptionist, Susan, periodically. Still in a meeting. Four p.m. is quitting time in Jena; at 3:50, I asked again. 'You know,' said Susan, 'she snuck out the back door.' If I came back the next morning, she assured me, 7:30 sharp, Edwards would be there. I asked Susan if she had heard of the ICE detention center. 'Everyone in town works there,' she said. 'Everyone knows.' I returned to the mayor's office the next morning, at 7:30. 'She's not coming in today,' said Susan, smiling. Although Louisiana, once the most incarcerated place in the world per capita, had plenty of prison towns, it hadn't always been big on immigrant warehousing. For one thing, it was a relatively new enterprise: When Jena got its first ICE detention center, ICE was a fledgling new law enforcement agency, established by the Bush administration in 2003. Louisiana wasn't a border state, nor did it have a terribly large immigrant population, which made it a less obvious place than, say, neighboring Texas to set up shop. ICE saw an opportunity to skip steps by relying on private-prison contractors. Even today, the agency relies on private-prison operators to house 90 percent of its detainees. So, with the GEO Group, Jena got a head start on what would become a booming immigrant incarceration industry: For a long while, its facility was the largest in the state. It even had its own immigration court, one of just two in Louisiana, where immigration judges decided whether detainees could be deported. (It was almost always a yes.) The location had certain advantages for ICE. Because of central Louisiana's remoteness, there was little visibility into the conditions and almost no resources for detainees, who were hours and hours away from the nearest urban centers, where things like immigration lawyers resided: nearly three hours from Baton Rouge, four from New Orleans. Meanwhile, the local courts system is extremely hostile to immigrants contesting their deportation and extremely deferential to ICE. Immigration courts like the one in Jena are staffed by immigration judges who are employees of the Department of Homeland Security, not independent jurists. Detainees appealing detention or deportation from central Louisiana must file in the Western District of Louisiana, a federal district court that from 2010 to 2020 ordered release in only 1 percent of such cases. If they manage to bring their case all the way to the presiding circuit court, they go before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative federal circuit in the nation. There, the courts deny more than 3 in 4 asylum claims. Being in Jena was like being in quicksand—the harder one fought deportation, the more stuck one got. It wasn't uncommon for immigrants to spend years in ICE detention without ever being convicted of a crime. Sometimes, if ICE appealed a ruling, a person could remain stuck even after winning. Few translators, few resources, in the middle of nowhere, a court with a rubber stamp. It was the perfect place to disappear. But neither remoteness nor favorable courts were enough to make central Louisiana into American Siberia. That didn't happen until the passage of a well-meaning statewide criminal justice reform effort. In 2017 Louisiana had a Democratic governor. Criminal justice reform had some bipartisan appeal back then. Even more importantly, it had big-money backing: The Koch brothers' political machine threw its weight behind a handful of criminal justice reform proposals. And soon enough, Louisiana had a whole raft of new laws: reducing mandatory minimums, shortening sentences, granting parole eligibility sooner. They overhauled and abridged drug sentencing and reeled in the state's much-maligned theft penalties. In just a year, Louisiana was no longer the country's most incarcerated state—it was No. 2, behind Oklahoma. (Soon, El Salvador built its own megaprison and toppled both states as the most incarcerated place on Earth.) But Louisiana's private-prison operators were first and foremost running a business, getting paid per bed to house inmates. They didn't intend to subsidize the state's soft touch. Firms like GEO turned to the federal government, which offered to pay almost twice as much per detainee for immigrants as the state of Louisiana was paying it to house locals, sometimes more. All of a sudden, private-prison operators were reopening jails and prisons that had been shuttered or were on their way to closure, often over allegations of abuse. Louisiana soon had more immigrants in detention than any other state but Texas. For ICE, it was money-saving: The day rates in Louisiana were cheaper than in other states, owing to its low wages and depressed local economy. For GEO, it was money-making and then some: State-run prisons or local jails are subject to state oversight bodies. But privately operated ICE detention centers are not subject to state inspections or regulations. And so central Louisiana boomed with new ICE facilities: in Jonesboro, in Monroe, in Ferriday, in Basile, and in Winnfield. Five of its nine detention centers opened in 2019. 'In the span of a year, the immigration detention in this state tripled,' said Mary C. Yanik, director of Tulane's Immigrants' Rights Clinic, 'largely built from a list of facilities that they were going to close or draw down.' And while a number of the college protesters targeted under Trump have since been freed, Khalil remains, despite still not having been charged with a crime. After 40 days in Jena, Alireza Doroudi, of the University of Alabama, quietly disappeared. He gave up the fight and returned to Iran. In Jena, everyone knew someone who worked at the ICE facility, and also no one knew anything. Friends, a cousin, a sister, a granddaughter, former co-workers, friends of friends. No one had heard anything about it, no one was picking up the phone, everyone would be back tomorrow and just so happened to be busy at the moment. At the doughnut shop, and again at the café, I was told that there were regularly ICE detention center employees but that I had only just missed them each time I arrived. At the drive-thru liquor store, which featured flags hanging from the rafters of Trump riding on a tank and Jesus grasping an American flag, one employee told me her ex-husband worked there. But she, too, knew nothing about it, wouldn't call him, didn't want to talk about it. At the local hospital, one employee told me that they did indeed have detainees show up for medical attention, accompanied by officials from the facility, but three other administrators came running to say that they could not and would not speak about that. At one of the town's many churches, I spoke with a woman who feared social retribution for saying anything. 'It's a really tight-knit community,' she warned. 'We did have someone come in and they visited their son out there, one family last year. We prayed with them,' she said, but asked no questions. 'It's its own little world out there' at the facility, she added. 'I never go out that direction.' At a thrift store, the clerk pulled from his wallet a photo of his granddaughter in her softball uniform. I asked what he thought about Khalil, about the men in the ICE facility. 'We don't need them,' he said. 'Send them back.' One day, I drove from Jena down to the Alexandria staging facility, one of the rare ICE detention structures situated directly on Tarmac. The detention center is relatively small, but the airport is one of the most important nodes in the entire nationwide ICE network: Detainees from all over Louisiana are brought here to be deported, or brought in from elsewhere, transferred from overcrowded jurisdictions to be submitted into the detention apparatus. I hoped to see evidence of the record arrivals, transports, and deportations that Rice had mentioned in his address at the GEO luncheon. The setup at Alexandria is unique. There is a public airport and runway for commercial flights, and a second, smaller runway serves private flights and ICE deportation both. The facility is ringed by a golf course. I drove into the parking lot of the private flight facility. I peered through a chain-link fence at a plane belonging to GlobalX, the charter airline commonly referred to as ICE Air, which sat on the runway. It was just before 2 p.m., punishingly hot and humid. The heat sizzled off the Tarmac. I watched as bus after white bus drove up to the plane and disgorged detainees. White bags were strewn all over the runway. I watched as deportees staggered off the bus by the dozen, the unmistakable waddle of men and women with their arms and legs shackled. Each stopped for a full-body pat-down before being directed to ascend the stairwell onto the plane. Some of the deportees wore white jumpsuits. Others were in civilian garb, jeans, and T-shirts. It went on for nearly an hour, then a second, smaller GlobalX plane pulled up behind it, and the process continued. For a while, these flights were trackable via online services like FlightRadar24. But when I plugged the tail code of the GlobalX plane into the tracker, it showed no active flight data going back weeks. Earlier that same day, one such flight had left from Alexandria for Honduras. On it, we now know, were three children with American citizenship: a 2-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 7-year-old. The 4-year-old had Stage 4 cancer. Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old had filed an emergency petition with the infamous Western District of Louisiana the day prior, seeking her release; the child was put on a plane that left at 6:10 the next morning, before the court opened. All afternoon it continued, the buses circling, the planes being loaded, and the roar of jet engines drowning out the sounds of golfers teeing off, putting, hitting. I drove up to the Jena ICE facility one last time and sat in the visitor parking lot. Within a few minutes, I spotted another police car, which drove slowly around the flagpole at the entrance, then left. That afternoon, my last in Jena, dark clouds gathered. Peals of thunder followed; soon, it began to rain hard. A group of girls, practicing softball at one of the baseball fields at Jena Town Park, ran for cover. A few days later, the Jena Lady Giants took on the Doyle Lady Tigers in the Louisiana state softball finals. The Lady Giants fell behind early, tied it, and led for one half inning. But the Lady Tigers scored three in the top of the fifth. Jena lost by one run.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Takeaways from AP's reporting on shuttered prisons, mass deportation push and no-bid contracts
Private prison operators are marketing their shuttered lockups to federal immigration officials as President Donald Trump pushes for mass deportations, with some facilities nabbing lucrative no-bid contracts. When Trump, a Republican, took office, politically connected private-prison giants CoreCivic Inc. and The Geo Group Inc. had around 20 idle facilities, partially the result of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the push to reopen them has been met with resistance in unexpected places like Leavenworth, Kansas, a town whose name alone evokes a short hand for serving hard time. The Leavenworth facility was mothballed in late 2021 after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. Here's a look at some of the takeaways from an Associated Press report about private prisons in the era of mass deportations. Demand for bed spurs interest in private prisons The Trump administration wants to increase its budgeted capacity of about 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and maybe — if private prison executives' predictions are accurate — more than 150,000. That has a gallery of shuttered facilities — some with a history of issues — coming online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, where Trump hopes to detain and deport millions of people. With Congress weighing massive spending increases for deportations, the companies' stock and profit estimates have soared. Deals inked as contract modifications or without bids Just last week, Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants. 'Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,' said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders. Leavenworth inspired the term 'the big house' But skeptical city officials in Leavenworth, a town of around 37,000 residents on the northwest fringe of the Kansas City metropolitan area, argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn't because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge last week issued an order requiring it. The area's politics and roots as a prison town might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president. And in years past, the federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term 'the big house.' CoreCivic 'caused the city all kinds of heartburn,' attorney says An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service. 'They just mismanaged it, and it caused the city all kinds of heartburn,' Hatley said. Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report in 2017. 'It was just mayhem,' recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. And the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a 2021 letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were 'false and defamatory.' Critics have included a federal judge When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: 'The only way I could describe it frankly, what's going on at CoreCivic right now is it's an absolute hell hole.' The city's lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force's ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes. The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. When asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees' experiences and said the company officials 'do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.' From idle prisons to a 'gold rush' ICE declared a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without 'Full and Open Competition.' Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE's document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan. The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn't been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical. CoreCivic officials said ICE's letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing. Financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, 'Great news.' 'Are you hiding any more of them on us?' he asked. ___ Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Morgan Lee, in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed reporting.
Associated Press
4 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Takeaways from AP's reporting on shuttered prisons, mass deportation push and no-bid contracts
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Private prison operators are marketing their shuttered lockups to federal immigration officials as President Donald Trump pushes for mass deportations, with some facilities nabbing lucrative no-bid contracts. When Trump, a Republican, took office, politically connected private-prison giants CoreCivic Inc. and The Geo Group Inc. had around 20 idle facilities, partially the result of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the push to reopen them has been met with resistance in unexpected places like Leavenworth, Kansas, a town whose name alone evokes a short hand for serving hard time. The Leavenworth facility was mothballed in late 2021 after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. Here's a look at some of the takeaways from an Associated Press report about private prisons in the era of mass deportations. Demand for bed spurs interest in private prisons The Trump administration wants to increase its budgeted capacity of about 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and maybe — if private prison executives' predictions are accurate — more than 150,000. That has a gallery of shuttered facilities — some with a history of issues — coming online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, where Trump hopes to detain and deport millions of people. With Congress weighing massive spending increases for deportations, the companies' stock and profit estimates have soared. Deals inked as contract modifications or without bids Just last week, Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants. 'Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,' said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders. Leavenworth inspired the term 'the big house'But skeptical city officials in Leavenworth, a town of around 37,000 residents on the northwest fringe of the Kansas City metropolitan area, argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn't because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge last week issued an order requiring it. The area's politics and roots as a prison town might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president. And in years past, the federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term 'the big house.' CoreCivic 'caused the city all kinds of heartburn,' attorney says An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service. 'They just mismanaged it, and it caused the city all kinds of heartburn,' Hatley said. Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report in 2017. 'It was just mayhem,' recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. And the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a 2021 letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were 'false and defamatory.' Critics have included a federal judge When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: 'The only way I could describe it frankly, what's going on at CoreCivic right now is it's an absolute hell hole.' The city's lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force's ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes. The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. When asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees' experiences and said the company officials 'do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.' From idle prisons to a 'gold rush' ICE declared a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without 'Full and Open Competition.' Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE's document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan. The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn't been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical. CoreCivic officials said ICE's letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing. Financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, 'Great news.' 'Are you hiding any more of them on us?' he asked. ___ Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Morgan Lee, in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed reporting.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
EPA drops case against prison company that has donated heavily to Trump
The Donald Trump administration has dropped up to $4m in potential fines against the private prison operator Geo Group over the latter's use of a toxic disinfectant in a detention center that allegedly put employees' and detainees' health at risk. The administration made the move after Geo donated over $4m to the president and Republican leadership, as well as Trump's inauguration fund. Geo is a key piece of the administration's immigration crackdown, and the federal government has paid it billions of dollars to hold US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. The company faced fines of up to about $3,550 for each of its approximately 1,100 violations for failing to provide its workers with protection from a toxic disinfectant heavily sprayed at its Adelanto, California, immigration facility in 2022-2023. The US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Justice changing course after the election is 'highly unusual', Gary Jonesi, a former EPA enforcement manager who retired earlier this year, told the Guardian. He called it a 'complete surrender'. 'If this is not due to political intervention on behalf of an early and large Trump donor who stands to gain from managing Ice detention facilities and private prisons, then surely it is at least partly due to the intimidation that career staff feel in an environment when federal employees are being fired and reassigned to undesirable tasks and locations,' Jonesi said. In an email, the EPA said: 'As a matter of longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on litigation.' Geo said: 'The case was dismissed with prejudice because the allegations were completely baseless and without merit.' 'GEO's COVID safety protocols at the Adelanto Facility focused on cleanliness and health, successfully protecting the lives of thousands of detainees in our care,' a spokesperson added. The disinfectant, called Halt, includes an EPA warning stating: 'Causes irreversible eye damage and skin burns. Harmful if swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Do not get in eyes, on skin, or on clothing.' Among its ingredients are quats, a chemical class that's under increased scrutiny for links to infertility, birth defects, hormone disruption, asthma and skin disorders. It also includes tetrasodium EDTA, a chemical made from formaldehyde and sodium cyanide. A separate civil lawsuit alleges Geo sickened inmates with its indiscriminate spraying of a similar disinfectant, HDQ Neutral, with most of the same ingredients. That is playing out in federal court, and plaintiffs allege, among other issues, the disinfectant causes blood clots in their lungs, nosebleeds, dizziness and headaches. The suit alleges staff sprayed the substance throughout the prison, 'including the front lobby, administrative areas, living areas, food and microwave areas, day room, corridors, intake units, and medical units. In the living areas, GEO staff would spray onto all surfaces including on soft, porous surfaces like mattresses and sheets'. The suit also alleges the substance got in detainees' food, and in one instance staff sprayed a detainee as punishment. EPA records show the agency cited Geo in March 2021, at which time it was using HDQ Neutral. It switched to Halt and continued spraying through early 2023. Geo fought the charges in administrative law court beginning in June 2024. The disinfectant is regulated under US pesticide laws, which require the use of goggles or a face shield, chemical-resistant gloves and protective clothing. Geo provided gloves for its staff, but the EPA noted the nitrile gloves' box stated that they were 'extra soft' and 'not intended for use as a general chemical barrier'. Geo argued that the gloves were sufficient for the chemicals in the disinfectant. If the two sides didn't settle, then an administrative law judge would decide the amount, if any, that Geo would have to pay. It's unclear how the negotiations played out, Jonesi said, but in its motion to dismiss, Geo suggested it would take the case in front of a jury, questioned some of EPA's findings and questioned if the agency had overstepped its authority. There were 'litigation risks', which is common in enforcement cases, Jonesi said. Under normal circumstances, if EPA enforcement officials felt they might lose in court, then they would probably offer a settlement with a much lower fine. 'Instead they just walked away and said 'We're not going to bother' – that's very unusual,' Jonesi said. Geo and its affiliated Pacs donated heavily to Trump Pacs and Republican congressional campaigns, federal election records compiled by the Open Secrets nonprofit shows. That included a $1m to Trump's Make America Great Again Pac, and over $1.2m to the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund. Geo also contributed $500,000 to Trump's inauguration. Geo was the first company to max out political donations to Trump's campaign. In his first day in office, Trump reversed a Biden executive order that aimed to curb the federal government's use of private prisons. Ice is holding about 50,000 people in immigration detention, an approximately 50% increase since January, though not all are held at Geo facilities. The EPA case is one of many that raises questions about favors in exchange for campaign donations, but it is 'a more egregious case than most', said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the Public Citizen nonprofit, which advocates for government transparency. 'Trump rewards his friends, and friends are those who give him money, and friends are those who comply with his edicts, and one of his main edicts is on immigration,' Holman said. With Republicans fully in control of the government, there's little that can be done in response, Holman added, unless Democrats retake at least part of Congress in 2026. 'The midterm elections means everything,' Holman said.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
EPA drops case against prison company that has donated heavily to Trump
The Donald Trump administration has dropped up to $4m in potential fines against the private prison operator Geo Group over the latter's use of a toxic disinfectant in a detention center that allegedly put employees' and detainees' health at risk. The administration made the move after Geo donated over $4m to the president and Republican leadership, as well as Trump's inauguration fund. Geo is a key piece of the administration's immigration crackdown, and the federal government has paid it billions of dollars to hold US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. The company faced fines of up to about $3,550 for each of its approximately 1,100 violations for failing to provide its workers with protection from a toxic disinfectant heavily sprayed at its Adelanto, California, immigration facility in 2022-2023. The US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Justice changing course after the election is 'highly unusual', Gary Jonesi, a former EPA enforcement manager who retired earlier this year, told the Guardian. He called it a 'complete surrender'. 'If this is not due to political intervention on behalf of an early and large Trump donor who stands to gain from managing Ice detention facilities and private prisons, then surely it is at least partly due to the intimidation that career staff feel in an environment when federal employees are being fired and reassigned to undesirable tasks and locations,' Jonesi said. In an email, the EPA said: 'As a matter of longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on litigation.' Geo said: 'The case was dismissed with prejudice because the allegations were completely baseless and without merit.' 'GEO's COVID safety protocols at the Adelanto Facility focused on cleanliness and health, successfully protecting the lives of thousands of detainees in our care,' a spokesperson added. The disinfectant, called Halt, includes an EPA warning stating: 'Causes irreversible eye damage and skin burns. Harmful if swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Do not get in eyes, on skin, or on clothing.' Among its ingredients are quats, a chemical class that's under increased scrutiny for links to infertility, birth defects, hormone disruption, asthma and skin disorders. It also includes tetrasodium EDTA, a chemical made from formaldehyde and sodium cyanide. A separate civil lawsuit alleges Geo sickened inmates with its indiscriminate spraying of a similar disinfectant, HDQ Neutral, with most of the same ingredients. That is playing out in federal court, and plaintiffs allege, among other issues, the disinfectant causes blood clots in their lungs, nosebleeds, dizziness and headaches. The suit alleges staff sprayed the substance throughout the prison, 'including the front lobby, administrative areas, living areas, food and microwave areas, day room, corridors, intake units, and medical units. In the living areas, GEO staff would spray onto all surfaces including on soft, porous surfaces like mattresses and sheets'. The suit also alleges the substance got in detainees' food, and in one instance staff sprayed a detainee as punishment. EPA records show the agency cited Geo in March 2021, at which time it was using HDQ Neutral. It switched to Halt and continued spraying through early 2023. Geo fought the charges in administrative law court beginning in June 2024. The disinfectant is regulated under US pesticide laws, which require the use of goggles or a face shield, chemical-resistant gloves and protective clothing. Geo provided gloves for its staff, but the EPA noted the nitrile gloves' box stated that they were 'extra soft' and 'not intended for use as a general chemical barrier'. Geo argued that the gloves were sufficient for the chemicals in the disinfectant. If the two sides didn't settle, then an administrative law judge would decide the amount, if any, that Geo would have to pay. It's unclear how the negotiations played out, Jonesi said, but in its motion to dismiss, Geo suggested it would take the case in front of a jury, questioned some of EPA's findings and questioned if the agency had overstepped its authority. There were 'litigation risks', which is common in enforcement cases, Jonesi said. Under normal circumstances, if EPA enforcement officials felt they might lose in court, then they would probably offer a settlement with a much lower fine. 'Instead they just walked away and said 'We're not going to bother' – that's very unusual,' Jonesi said. Geo and its affiliated Pacs donated heavily to Trump Pacs and Republican congressional campaigns, federal election records compiled by the Open Secrets nonprofit shows. That included a $1m to Trump's Make America Great Again Pac, and over $1.2m to the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund. Geo also contributed $500,000 to Trump's inauguration. Geo was the first company to max out political donations to Trump's campaign. In his first day in office, Trump reversed a Biden executive order that aimed to curb the federal government's use of private prisons. Ice is holding about 50,000 people in immigration detention, an approximately 50% increase since January, though not all are held at Geo facilities. The EPA case is one of many that raises questions about favors in exchange for campaign donations, but it is 'a more egregious case than most', said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the Public Citizen nonprofit, which advocates for government transparency. 'Trump rewards his friends, and friends are those who give him money, and friends are those who comply with his edicts, and one of his main edicts is on immigration,' Holman said. With Republicans fully in control of the government, there's little that can be done in response, Holman added, unless Democrats retake at least part of Congress in 2026. 'The midterm elections means everything,' Holman said.
