The feds quickly opened a facility in Artesia, New Mexico, with the specific mission of detaining mothers and young children. But that facility drew controversy and closed down before the year was out. Many of the detainees there were then transferred to a new facility in the town of Dilley, Texas. The benignly-named South Texas Family Residential Center, also called Dilley, is a 2,400-bed immigrant detention center that serves as a temporary home—if that’s the appropriate word to use for a place you can’t leave—for mothers and young children.
Hard to blame ICE. Have to find new sources of detainees since the number of undocumented workers has been falling so much over the last few years. Otherwise, they'd be non-compliant with the law, which, I shit you not, actually says that they have a daily minimum. Families are a good way to kill three or four birds with one stone.
What's also amazing is that this single 2,400 bed facility has grossed $100MM in the first 6 months of 2015. Assuming they're full all the time, that's an annual rate of $83,000 per inmate. And people think it's expensive to NOT deport them. They could put all their kids in school, get ER visits once per month, and never pay a dime of taxes and they wouldn't cost the economy that kind of money (while actually being able to contribute to it by working). Unreal.
Who was it that argued in congress that the United States could save money by paying every man, woman and child in North Vietnam $70k a year not to fight instead of dropping napalm on them? The United States has some puritanically stupid ideas about incarceration. My experiences with Youngluck were a fuckin' Red Pill.
- 40m people in Vietnam, 1968 - $352B spent on Vietnam War Call it 1964 to 1972, since it was sort of open-ended on both sides, and it's eight years. Over that period, we spent $1100 per year per inhabitant of Vietnam (north and south) "policing" North Vietnam. Could be worse - we're (arguably) at $50m per Taliban killed and during the Iraq War, we fired off 250,000 bullets for every enemy casualty. Dunno about you, but I've watched my friends pay $40 for a box of 20 5.56N. At $2/round, that's $500k per rebel just in FMJ.