GEO Group recently sold three immigration detention facilities in Adelanto, California, to the federal government for $950 million. GEO expects to net about $705 million after federal and state taxes and fees. The company plans to use that infusion of cash for stock buybacks (to strengthen GEO’s stock value for a smaller pool of stockholders) and other business maneuvers.
CoreCivic is selling detention facilities to DHS for just over $1 billion in San Diego and in Kern County. Other sales in Minnesota and Kansas will garner the company a total of $734 million.
Both GEO and CoreCivic will continue to manage and provide support services to the detention facilities that have been sold.
Back in August, Time Magazine asked why DHS was suddenly buying up these prisons from private contractors. The main reasons given then were space issues and an “unprecedented” level of scrutiny leading these private, for-profit companies to want to offload risk onto the federal government. The spokespeople involved keep bringing up the Supremacy Clause, but not in a way that makes it seem like any of them have actually read the Constitution.
When you’re kidnapping people and killing them on the streets, it seems like almost any level of scrutiny would be fairly “precedented.” And it’s hard not to notice that the current federal régime is using billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize GEO and CoreCivic’s shareholders. Their PR teams can mutter about the Sixth Amendment all they want, this is clearly just a shell game of greed with millions of actual human lives hanging in the balance.
(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)
