The Global Police State by William I Robinson;

Author:William I Robinson;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, over 350,000 immigrants were going through privately run prisons for the undocumented each year and record numbers were being deported, even though the absolute number of immigrants had declined.

As the war on immigrants escalated, so too did profit-making opportunities opened up by the war. It was revealed in 2017 that some 60,000 immigrants held in Geo Group detention centers were being coerced into performing all sorts of labor to upkeep the company’s facilities in exchange for $1 a day in pay. By relying on the free work of the detainees, charged a lawsuit filed against the company, Geo Group maintained an entire facility in Colorado with just one janitor on the payroll.108 The government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency also turned to privatizing flights deporting immigrants. One of several companies contracted by ICE, CSI Aviation, received more than $300 million in contracts to provide ICE with air passenger service in the three years from 2014 to 2016. A government report found that ICE was often paying for charter flights that were mostly empty. Not just detention and deportation, but everything in between, from food, phone systems, and other services provided to the detention facilities, are contracted out to private companies. This includes government contracts to private companies for GPS ankle monitors placed on detainees released on bond, even though the detainees must themselves pay hundreds of dollars a month to wear the monitors.109

As we have seen, digitalization opens up new technological possibilities for developing and deploying the global police state. The tech sector in the United States has become heavily involved in the war on immigrants as Silicon Valley plays an increasingly central role in the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions, and deportations. As their profits rise from participation in this war, leading tech companies have in turn pushed for an expansion of incarceration and deportation of immigrants and lobbied the state to expedite the use of its social control and surveillance technologies in anti-immigrant campaigns. According to one report:

Immigrant communities and overpoliced communities now face unprecedented levels of surveillance, detention, and deportation. Tech innovation and infrastructure makes this possible, allowing immigration enforcement to rely on policing through huge databases, computer programs, tech employees analyzing big data, and shareable cloud-based storage. These systems accumulate unprecedented amounts of personal and private information and enable the rapid expansion of information-sharing capabilities among city, state, and regional law enforcement agencies, as well as some foreign governments, for the purpose of finding, deporting, and detaining immigrants. Immigration enforcement and detention is now big business for Silicon Valley. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and many other law enforcement agencies spend billions of taxpayer dollars on procuring and maintaining these new systems. Currently, about 10 percent of the DHS $44 billion budget is dedicated to data management. A handful of huge corporations, like Amazon Web Services and Palantir, have built a “revolving door” to develop and entrench Silicon Valley’s role in fueling the incarceration and deportation regime.

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