Introduction:

The criminalization of immigration through policies like President Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” policy have swelled the numbers of people in U.S. detention centers. Recent reports have exposed the inhumane conditions in these centers, including those that have caused dozens of deaths.

Many people have rightly contested the very existence of these detention centers, given these abysmal conditions, and have called for investigation and a total reassessment of mass detention of asylum seekers and immigrants. When faced with this criticism, one of the main defenses of government officials in states and counties where the centers are located is that they make economic sense. The centers, it is argued, bring revenue and jobs to areas that need them.

This IPS report punctures this myth by looking into a large immigrant detention center in rural New Mexico run by CoreCivic, one of the largest private corporations running prisons and detention centers.

In 2016, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracted with Cibola County to house “administrative detainees” at a detention center run by the for-profit corporation CoreCivic. The cost was $30 million a year for five years, for a total of $150 million, with the county counting on the facility as a job-builder and taxpayer. Our analysis of New Mexico’s Cibola County Detention Facility finds that the economic and jobs arguments are grossly overstated.