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From The New York Times: A handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.
Illegal migrants apprehended in the U.S.-Mexico border are placed in holding facilities, this one supervised by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, , before being returned to Mexico. (photo: U.S. Border Patrol)
Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.
But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.