Sunday’s focus of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” was the (large) enterprise of our immigration detention methods. The terror unleashed by President Donald Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement equipment has made an already problematic immigration system even worse, as people who find themselves depending on our damaged immigration legal guidelines discover themselves dragged into detention.
Oliver breaks down the principle motive why the unjust system has continued to thrive: the large enterprise of personal prisons, which homes greater than 90% of ICE’s undocumented detentions. Personal jail corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic have watched their shares soar since Trump received the election.
“I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years,” CEO Damon Hininger boasts in a single clip. “And this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company.”
“Look, as a general rule, if something happens that causes a private prison company to get really excited, that thing was bad,” Oliver remarks. “If you ever come home and your spouse tells you, honey, I did something today and the Geo Group is super excited about it, you are in for a relationship-altering conversation.”
ICE’s web site factors out that detention is supposed to be “non-punitive,” a declare Oliver jokes is like saying, “that the ocean is not wet or that the ‘Wicked’ movie wasn’t 30 minutes too long. It is a bold assertion, sharply undercut by empirical evidence.”
The GEO Group is combating in court docket to keep away from paying minimal wage to the detainees being compelled to work below risk of solitary confinement or the withholding of meals. Oliver performs audio of an alternate between a GEO Group lawyer and the decide, the place the decide characterised the personal jail’s argument about detainees as the identical as slavery.
“When a judge is likening your client’s practices to slavery, that’s generally a pretty bad sign for your case,” Oliver says. “There really shouldn’t even be a verdict at that point. A trapdoor should just open up beneath you while they pull the next case in.”
And who’s being thought-about for detention can also be problematic. At one among her first White Home briefings, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave a grotesquely wrong-headed assertion that has subsequently been parroted by ICE Barbie herself, Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem: any undocumented individual is a legal. “I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are,” Leavitt mentioned.
“Simply being undocumented is a civil violation, not a criminal one,” Oliver factors out of Leavitt. “That is an important distinction that her boss should frankly understand, given that he has committed both.”
