President Donald Trump’s deputies say they will dramatically expand the detention space needed for the bureaucratic process of flying illegal migrants back to their foreign homes, according to NBC News.
“The goal is to double the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds — 41,000 are now allocated by Congress — to hold … migrants for short periods while they await deportation after their arrests inside the U.S.,” sources told NBC News.
The extra detention beds can be rented from state jails, from private sector companies, or be quickly built by the U.S. military. “That’s something they know how to do,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. “They’re really good at it, they can do it quickly, and they have the money for it,” he added.
The law-enforcement push is a windfall for companies — GEO Group and CoreCivic — that manage detention space for migrants, NBC reported. The companies were spurned by President Joe Biden’s deputies, who successfully released millions of migrants into the U.S. to take jobs and housing from Americans. NBC News reported:
Brian Evans, GEO Group’s chief executive officer, said on the call, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”
On CoreCivic’s recent earnings call, CEO Damon Hininger noted that the company already has additional vacant beds in its system that could be used to meet a postelection demand. “So we are taking proactive steps and working on a plan to activate and make available every single bed that we’ve got in the enterprise,” Hininger said. “And again, that’s about 18,000 beds.”
The space is needed for two groups of migrants: The new migrants who must quickly pay their smuggling debts with U.S. jobs, and the illegal migrants who are being sent home, said Krikorian.
When sending migrants home, “it always takes time to get the paperwork from their home country,” Krikorian said:
We can’t just land in a country, open the door, and push people out. You have to get travel documents from that country. Most countries are cooperative in taking back their own people, but a lot of them aren’t. So you need to hold on to people until we’re prepared to send them back, because the alternative is they’ll [hide] and you’ll never find it.
Roughly 1.3 million migrants have been ordered home by judges, but have been ignored by Biden’s deputies. But those migrants will be released gradually, he said. “Removing large numbers of people is not a one-time event, it’s a process … you don’t need a bed for every illegal alien all at once,” Krikorian said.
The detention space is also needed to deter more migrants from coming to the United States, Krikorian said:
Detention is the key to controlling the border because the whole reason for the four years of disaster under Biden is the policy of “Catch and Release” [which allows migrants to get jobs]. Once people are not released if they cross the border illegally, they won’t get what they want, which is being let go [to get jobs] …
It’s something that you’re going to spend a lot of money on for a few months until it becomes clear [to migrants] that they’re just not going to be able to get away with it. Then the number of people attempting to cross is going to go down. Because why take on the expense and the risk [of migrating to the border] if the odds of being let go into the United States are now low … They can do the same cost-benefit analysis as anybody else.
Advocates for migration have worked for many years to prevent the detention of migrants. For example, the ACLU expanded the 2015 Flores Settlement with the help of President Barack Obama’s pro-migration deputies. The settlement forces border officials to release migrants with children after just 20 days, and so it led to a massive spike in the number of migrants who brought young children to get through the border.
The Flores settlement can be bypassed by federal regulations.
The federal detention space is also needed to compensate for the refusal of city and state governments to detain migrants once they are located by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
In Biden’s four-year term, his pro-migration deputies will have released roughly 9 million migrants into the United States.
Border chief Alejandro Mayorkas repeatedly explained that he welcomed more migrants because of his migrant parents, his sympathy for migrants, and his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners.
He also justified his welcome for migrants by saying his priorities are above the law, and claiming that the “needs” of U.S. business are paramount — regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans, the impact on U.S. children, or Americans’ rational opposition.
