In a post about Arizona’s new immigration law the other day, I naïvely posted this:
I estimate that the Border Patrol catches around a hundred illegal border-crossers a day in Arizona alone. Anywhere you go in southern Arizona, you see Border Patrol checkpoints and the big white ex-Greyhound buses they use to haul the day’s catch back to Nogales and Agua Prieta. . . .
My guess was far too low: according to an investigative report by journalist Dahr Jamail, “1,000-1,500 immigrants a day are processed through the Federal Court in Tucson.” More than 50 percent of illegal migrants crossing from Mexico come through the south-central Arizona corridor served by that court.
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Jamail’s article contains some other numbers, along with some startling facts:
- Judge Tom Ferraro processes 75 illegals every weekday at the $67 million dollar Evo DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson.
- Court-appointed detainee lawyers are paid between $6,000 and $12,000 a day.
- Average length of a detainee hearing before Judge Ferraro is one minute and three seconds, and the verdict is always “guilty.”
- This kangaroo court was created by the Bush administration as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Streamline,” which has pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into Arizona’s economy.
- It costs taxpayers between $20 and $22 million per month to run the courthouse, “not including lawyers or the private prison complex that locks up the immigrants.”
- The private prison is the Eloy Detention Center, a 1,500-bed facility built solely to house illegal immigrants. It is operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). “David Gonzalez, Arizona’s US marshal, said taxpayers shell out between $9 and $11 million every month to incarcerate migrants at Eloy alone.”
- The Wackenhut Corporation, a private security firm, contracts with the DHS to transport detainees from the point of capture to the detention center, from there to the court in Tucson, and from there either back to the detention center or to a Mexican receiving area in Nogales, Sonora. Wackenhut’s cut of the illegal immigration bonanza is unreported.
- “Former Arizona Democratic Senator Dennis DeConcini (whose father the courthouse is named after), is on the board of directors of CCA, and is also friends with former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, who left that post to become DHS Director.”
As Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “Follow the money. Always follow the money.” And what do you get when you follow the money? Disillusioned, every fucking time.
My friends, if you think capturing, detaining, and repatriating illegal migrants has anything to do with justice, the “rule of law,” or anything other than lining the pockets of a few well-connected individuals, you’re as hopelessly naïve as I was. Read the whole article. It’s important, and it’s unlikely to get any mainstream media coverage.
Oh, one other fascinating detail from Jamail’s article:
- “[Border Patrol agents] tend to call migrants ‘tonks’ because that is the sound their flashlights make when they strike the skull of a migrant.”
Doesn’t that make you proud to be an American?