December 28, 2018
The forced inactivity of a federal government shutdown has lent an eerie cast to the customarily quiet period between Christmas and New Year’s. That news lull was punctured in the most distressing way with the news, on Christmas Day. We learned that yet another migrant child, 8 year old Felipe Gomez Alonso, had died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, after being shuttled among four different facilities during his six days of detention, (Source: “‘A Breaking Point’: Second Child’s Death Prompts New Procedures for Border Agency,” by Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, 12/26/18).
The overcrowded and chaotic conditions at the border are a direct result of the Trump administration’s policy of deliberately slowing down the processing of immigrants at the border, in a process known as ‘metering,’ which creates a bottleneck. In addition, this administration’s insistence on imprisoning those who present themselves at the border, rather than releasing them with a later court date, results in people being held for days on end in facilities that were not intended to hold families, or any person, for an extended period of time (Source: ibid). These policies are literally killing children!
Buried in the coverage of Felipe’s tragic and unnecessary death was a throwaway line about ICE’s struggle to “find enough space in family detention centers and other shelters in the interior of the country,” (Source: ibid). Precious little attention has been focused on the precise nature of these “other shelters,” until the article that appeared in The Daily Beast yesterday. In a shocking expose, The Daily Beast revealed that thousands of migrants who are guilty of a misdemeanor, at most, are being held in private prisons where they perform slave labor for wages as low as $1.00/ day, at an annual taxpayer cost of $807 million dollars, (Source: “$800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies,” by Spencer Ackerman, Adam Rawnsley, TheDailyBeast.com, 12/27/18).
The two companies that dominate the private prison industry, Geo Group and Core Civic imprison 18,000 people, 41% of those detained by ICE. That dominance contributes to Geo Group’s projected earnings of $2.3 billion this year, up 5.5% from 2016, when Geo Group and Core Civic contributed “a combined half-million dollars to Trump’s inauguration committee,” (Source: ibid).
These private prisons detain immigrants on average twice as long as public prisons (87 vs. 33.3 days). Thus when DHS talks of hastening the process of getting immigrants to detention centers and “shelters” we should understand that they mean to feed more prisoners into the maw of a private prison industry that profits from slave labor.
It is against this backdrop that we should read The New Yorker’s deep dive into how reality show impresario, Mark Burnett, repackaged Donald Trump as a brilliant businessman and sold that image to a credulous American public. While it is tempting to hold Mark Burnett singularly responsible for Trump’s rise, Burnett did not create the media ecosystem that jettisoned any pretense of public service in pursuit of the ad dollars that an expanded audience would bring. There is no hot tub time machine that can rewind the clock to reinstate The Fairness Doctrine or retroactively inculcate a sense of social responsibility in the media titans who gobbled up television networks and demanded that news be profitable.
Yet while we can’t change the perverse incentives that compel the media to treat politics like sports, replete with metaphors about a “fantasy draft” of candidates who are considering “entering the ring”, we can resist focusing on the shallow and superficial ourselves. We can insist on ferreting out what a candidate’s actual positions are on voting rights, climate change, income inequality and immigration and cast our vote for the person we think is best qualified to make ours a more equitable society that adheres to the principle that no person is above the law. We can reject the vision of politics as a three ring circus that exists to entertain us. If we don’t, we risk just putting a charismatic pretty face in charge of a regime that values profits over people and thinks nothing of enslaving immigrants or coddling murderous dictators if it means we can make a buck.