Texas hold’em…

From Grits For Breakfast comes another sweetheart deal for GEO Group — the rent-a-prison folks. Homeland Security isn’t just deporting improperly documented aliens (including legal ones, and the occasional natural born citizen), but they’ve decided to prosecute them for whatever they can find — the theory being that an alien deportee with a criminal record can be charged with more serious crimes if they return — which means having to hold the deportee until they have a criminal trial.  So…

the GEO group has just opened yet another private prison on the border.  This one is in Laredo:

The prison will hold pre-trial federal detainees for the U.S. Marshals – many of whom will be immigrants prosecuted for criminal violations under the program Operation Streamline. The facility was proposed back in 2003, and even before the official launch of Streamline, the Marshals capacity was being pushed almost exclusively by expanded criminal prosecution of immigration violations (PDF), a departure from the old style of dealing with immigration issues in the immigration court system.

Simply put, this $100 million gift to the GEO Group is almost exclusively due to the government holding border-crossers in criminal jail for 30-90 days before deporting them. Doesn’t seem too “streamlined” to me.