ICE/GEO: Detaining Immigrants for Profit

“Conditions at the NW Detention Center are inhumane and violate international law and the US Constitution.”
—OneAmerica, www.WeAreOneAmerica.com

Checkpoints are often seen as a distant reality, occurring in countries far from this one. The truth is that there are checkpoints right here in Washington State.

The Office of Homeland Security has contracted enforcement officers using ferry landings and roadblocks as far as 100 miles away from the Canadian borders to patrol Washington residents, effectively undermining our constitutional right to privacy.

Just one example of the many checkpoints is in nearby Federal Way, where on Pacific Ave., it has become a well-known fact that if you are a person of color, you should carry your papers with you at all times, because most likely an immigration agent will pull you over and ask you to identify yourself as “legal,” whether you have been in the country for three months or three generations.

Those who are deemed potentially “illegal” are then sent off to the Northwest Regional Detention Center in Tacoma. At the detention center, an average of 93 immigrants are detained daily, and massive deportations take place each year.

As Mark Wedeven, ESL curriculum co-coordinator at CIELO, states, “It is a private industrial complex. They only have money to gain by detaining more people. It quite literally terrorizes—they go into people’s homes, they conduct raids late at night, and they take people away”.

There are two groups who are responsible for and work together to administer the operations of the NW Detention Center: the GEO Group Inc. and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Together, these organizations have the surreal power of determining whether the people who are detained will or will not be able to continue their lives with their families and communities.

The the GEO Group is the self-acclaimed leader of providing private correctional and detention management to government organizations. ICE is a government agency with a specific goal to remove all “undocumented migrants by the year 2012.”

Working side by side, this dynamic duo is in a relationship where the removal of immigrants creates profit—$57.2 million in 2008 alone. According to the Seattle University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic, “ICE currently pays private prison companies and local cities and counties for each immigrant held at an average rate of $95 per immigrant per day.”

The number of detainees has been steadily increasing—in 2007, going from 18,000 to 26,000. As the number of detainees rises, so do the profits of GEO. Of the people detained at the Northwest Detention Center, 85% do not have legal council or basic rights to due process. Freedom from unlawful searches or seizures are not respected. According to Wedeven, “The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma receives detainees from Washington, Oregon and California. GEO, a for-profit corporation, also runs the migrant operations center at Guantanamo Bay.”

While discussing with Kenneth Hoyt, the co-coordinator of CISPES (Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) and longtime LASO (Latin American Solidarity Organization) activist about the ICE detention center, he stated, “Depending on your definition of violence, it could be argued that ICE is one of the most violent institutions in our society and epitomizes the worst of gringo power.”

The work ICE and GEO do highlight people’s ideas of borders, people’s relation to them, and who decides where and how to draw these lines through people’s and their own land. As Hoyt goes on the say, “the power to decide who belongs where and the enforcement of artificial boundaries between people is a vile act, and is racist from start to finish.”

Hoyt breaks down this current push by ICE to remove undocumented peoples as a “paper thin curtain of patriotism [used to] conceal the evil of US border policy, and I don’t think it takes much to get past that bullshit.” Many migrants are “pushed here by a neoliberal assault on their homelands.”

These are important human rights violations that are happening in our communities. The evils of checkpoints, holding people without reason, and policies based on racial discrimination are all around our daily lives. Hoyt ends by saying, “I wish I could say that what they do is anti-American, but this country was founded on state and vigilante violence against the original people of this continent.”

Feb. 13 is a day of action to show that the people of Washington State will not allow this to continue in their state. Several local groups are organizing around this issue and planning events for this day, including Bridges Not Walls, Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, Latin American Solidarity Organization, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

The first stop will be the NW Regional Detention Center where, we will drop off food and coffee for the visitors of detained immigrants, who have often traveled from as far away as southern Oregon and Idaho for the chance of seeing their loved ones.

It is challenging for family members to visit detainees. Visiting hours are only on Saturday, so we will stop to show support for detainees and their families. We will spend a few minutes at the detention center and then will reconvene at UW Tacoma in the downtown area for a march to the offices of Senators Murray and Cantwell, in the Chamber of Commerce building, which is also the World Trade Center Building.
According to Hoyt, “What we hope to do with our February action is to help expose this injustice for what it is. If the US keeps violating human rights in the nominal “defense of freedom and democracy,” it won’t be long before there’s nothing left to defend.”

A carpool will be leaving from the Olympia Timberland Library at 11 am on Feb. 13. Whether you care about where your tax money is going or the morality of detaining people because of immigration status, it is time to close down the NW Detention Center. In the words Mark Weveden, “Ultimately it is going to be our choice, as members of our communities and as citizens of this country. We are going to have to make the changes.”