By Gonzalo Santos, Community Voices, The Bakersfield Californian, Sunday February 16, 2020.
The ongoing attempt by GEO Group, the corporation that runs the 400-bed Mesa Verde federal immigrant detention center in Bakersfield for profit, to expand to McFarland to hold 1,400 more immigrant detainees, must be resolutely opposed.
For one thing, the State of California enacted a law last October (AB 32) that bans for-profit immigrant detention centers in our state, and while it allows any prior contract with ICE to continue until it expires, it explicitly bans “any extensions made to or authorized by that contract” [Section 9505 (a)]. GEO Group is fighting AB 32 in state court while seeking municipal permits to expand its detention facilities. Despite GEO’s aggressive defiance, challenging this unequivocal state law, and defying the strong, unified will of the state legislature and executive branch is a losing proposition. The McFarland city officials, understandably hard-pressed to find revenues for their town, should not squander their own limited resources and community’s respect betting on a dead horse. I told them as much at their January 21 hearing.
GEO Group is not just any employer; it is an immoral corporation making money trafficking with the lives of mostly Latino immigrants, making 20% of its profits in contracts with a run-amok, rouge federal agency, ICE, that indiscriminately persecutes and tears immigrant families apart at an enormous cost to tax payers: ICE spent $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2018 on detention facilities; it costs about $120 a day per detainee in Mesa Verde, while alternative programs would cost $4.42 a day per person. Our tax money at work?
[An added note: BTW, back in 2015, the Washington Post published an article, “How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about,” exposing the private-prison industry’s three-pronged approach to increase profits through political influence: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships and networks. Many other exposés have been published since. Here in Bakersfield, powerful Republican operator Cathy Abernathy is consulting with GEO. She was spotted at the 1st hearing in McFarland and later at a dinner with GEO’s executives.]
As to the conditions inside these detention facilities, things are getting much worse inside what I call the American Gulag. The Trump administration is aggressively challenging the so-called Flores Settlement Agreement, that bans holding children in detention for more than 20 days, so it can expand and hold whole families in detention for an indefinite time. And just this past December, the administration surreptitiously lowered even more the already low standards of accountability and procedures inside the Gulag – allowing much more solitary confinement, permitting torture techniques like “hog-tying, fetal restrains, and tight restrains,” dispensing with outdoor recreation areas, relaxing health assessments and reporting of serious injuries, illness, or even death, of detainees.
The Mesa Verde facility has been repeatedly found by inspectors to violate all sorts of minimal standards already. Since its inception, it has been a terrible stain on Bakersfield. Initially, GEO quietly relied on McFarland as its municipal “sponsor” partner, for a price. When that was exposed, the McFarland City Council terminated its rubberstamp association with Mesa Verde. Now GEO is attempting to buy that municipality again – out in the open! – for a huge expansion of immigrant detentions in our area. Do the city authorities in McFarland really want to go back to serve as ICE/GEO’s prestanombres (name lenders) and invite ICE immigrant persecutors into their own town, which happens to be 95.2 % Latino and 38.2 % foreign-born?
That way of procuring revenues strikes me as particularly callous and cannibalistic. Not only will McFarland’s residents live in constant terror of ICE, but will place all our Latino communities in the surrounding Southern San Joaquin Valley in more danger. There is an estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants just in Kern County alone, most of whom work hard in the fields, producing more agricultural wealth than any other county in the state, and whose U.S.-born children study hard, make it to the university where I teach, and go on to succeed and contribute greatly to our community. It’s America’s story.
But I have had students whose parents were detained and unjustly deported, who had to take responsibility for their younger siblings while studying and working. Let’s not make it harder for them, or their parents. What they need is more safety, not more terror, and to provide a path to legalization. Let’s fix that.
How to attract employers to McFarland? Well, McFarland’s educational attainment levels are dismal: only 48% have finished high school and only 3.7% finished college (versus 82.9% and 33.3% for the state, respectively). This accounts for why the town does not attract employers.
Instead of signing immoral and self-destructive contracts with ICE/GEO, what the McFarland authorities need to do is seek partnerships with the many state agencies and foundations in California eager to help improve their constituents’ educational attainment – the only way to attract and retain worthy employers in search for qualified workers. But to do so, they need to join the rest of the state in resolutely protecting immigrant families, not embrace the torrid business of persecuting them for profit.
A word on the politics surrounding this nefarious affair. It is no secret that the powerful, mostly white, Republican political machine that runs our county has historically been anti-Mexican, anti-farmworker, and anti-immigrant. I expect them, from the Kern County Board of Supervisors on down, to continue feigning it’s “not their jurisdiction” to confront ICE and GEO [See the latest debate between Emilio Huerta and David Couch, candidates for District 4 county supervisor here], while opposing every pro-immigrant bill in Sacramento. In a majority-Latino county such as ours, that is a continuing scandal. But there is a second scandal: the missing-in-action aspect of most of our local Democratic office-holders and candidates when it comes to this issue. When are they going to take a strong stand and demand ICE out of our county?
Dr. Gonzalo Santos has taught Sociology at CSUB and lived in Bakersfield since 1992.
Source: The Bakersfield Californian
