Law enforcement is in the business of dealing with insecurity. But the one thing that’s always secure about America’s law-enforcement system is the number of immigrants it imprisons each day. The government has written into law the number of non-citizens it seeks to deprive of freedom at any given moment: 34,000.
A study by Detention Watch Network (DWN) and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) explores the social impacts of the perverse incentive of the so-called “lockup quota” of 34,000 designated “beds” for immigrant detainees. The system locks in a federal funding stream and sustains jobs, commercial contracts, and a political consensus around the need for ever more “border security.” So the detention industry banks on 34,000 bodies, culled from a bottomless supply of more than 11 million undocumented migrants, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local police round up and funnel in potential deportees. ...