Statement by Mary Meg McCarthy, Executive Director, Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center
The city council of Gary, Indiana, voted unanimously last night to reject a bid by private prison company GEO Group to build an 800-bed immigration detention center near the city’s airport. Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) commends council members for recognizing the devastating impact private prisons have on communities, including the people they detain and employ.
NIJC is particularly grateful for the leadership of council members Ragen Hatcher and LaVetta Sparks-Wade, who ensured the GEO Group proposal was brought to a vote and brought an end to unnecessary and protracted debate over a project that has been strongly opposed by the Gary community since it was first proposed several months ago.
This proposal was the fifth failed attempt to build a private immigration detention center in the Chicagoland area, and the second failed attempt in Gary. NIJC applauds the strong leadership of community groups, including the Northwest Indiana Federation of Interfaith Organizations, Black Lives Matter, the Mass Incarceration + GEO Halt Team (MIGHT), the Baptist Ministers Conference of Gary & Vicinity, and Concerned Citizens of Gary. The Gary community’s efforts to keep GEO Group out of their city was supported by allies from across the country.
In light of its latest failure, GEO Group must acknowledge that the Midwest will not welcome new private prisons or an expansion of immigration detention. No one should profit off the misery wrought by locking up members of our communities in detention facilities rife with human rights abuses. Among the 31 people who have died in immigration detention since 2012, 26 people died in the custody of privately operated detention centers. Ten of those deaths occurred at GEO Group facilities. As NIJC, Detention Watch Network, and the ACLU revealed in the February 2016 Fatal Neglect report, some deaths have resulted from detention contractors’ failures to meet basic medical care standards.