Making Money from Misery

While jailing immigrants for money is part of the larger issue of privatized incarceration in America, immigrants differ from other incarcerated people in that their only crime is trying to escape desperate poverty or life-threatening human rights abuses in their home countries--much of it caused by U.S. economic and military aggression. While the increase in deportations of asylum seekers and refugees has increased under Obama, the law mandating that 34,000 immigrants be held in the 250 detention centers around the country -- passed in 1996 by Congress -- is apparently a means of making money from immigrants' misery.

Given that half the 250 detention centers in the US are privatized prisons, this law -- complemented by Free Trade laws that cause economic displacement in Latin America -- is arguably one of the most cynically inhumane pieces of legislation elected U.S. officials have ever churned out. Real News interviews Catalina Nieto of Detention Watch Network about the reality of immigrant detention in the US, and how U.S. policy around the world creates forced migration.