LAKE WORTH — President Trump‘s revised travel ban barring immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations from coming to the United States is a plot to benefit the private prison industry, the executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center said today in a statement.
“The latest rewrite of the immigration ban…is nothing more than a scheme to benefit the private prison industry wrapped in the false cloak of national security,” Paul Wright said. “The adminitration’s vilification of immigrants, fueling the recent alarming increase in deportation arrests, is a means to ensure inreased profits for the private, for-profit prisons used to house them.”
Trump signed the revised order today, which removed Iraq citizens from the ban while also ditching a clause that protected religious minorities. Federal judges blocked Trump’s original ban in January.
The revised order won’t impact people who have already been issued visas.
Wright said more than six out of ten immigration detention beds are not in public facilities operated by the governement, but in private, for-profit prisons.
“These facilities operate outside public scrutiny with no transparency and even less accountability and have a long history of abuses and in-custody deaths,” Wright said.
The center, a non-profit based in Lake Worth, said Trump should concentrate on comprehensive immigration reforms.
“In short, our nation’s immigration detention system should not be locking people up for the purposes of generating corporate profit for politically-connected prison firms,” Wright said.