End Nashville's Contracts with ICE and CoreCivic

Across the country, activists are coalescing around the demand to #AbolishICE, a fundamentally racist agency which exists in order to terrorize, incarcerate, and deport immigrants and people of color as well as political opponents of the administration. This cruel reality has only become more clear in recent weeks, as the President has released an Executive Order that sets up a network of military-run internment camps to indefinitely detain immigrant families on the border, including families caught up in raids here in the interior of the country. In Nashville, doing our part means no longer offering our local institutions as resources for ICE's ethnic cleansing and family separation campaigns. CoreCivic is the largest private prison company in the world, and uses its influence and fortune to lobby for longer prison sentences, fewer rules governing the treatment of detainees, and anti-immigrant laws that have forced tens of thousands more immigrant parents into prison, such as the racist “show me your papers” law (SB1070) in Arizona in 2010. CoreCivic has publicly stated that any reduction in the prison population will hurt its profits and hurt its business model, and spends tremendous amounts of money lobbying for increased prison budgets and giving campaign contributions to politicians, political action committees, and nonprofit organizations with influence over prison policy. CoreCivic currently operates dozens of private prison facilities for adult immigrants, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the T Don Hutto Family Detention Center, where many mothers whose children were taken from them at the border have been imprisoned. A group of those mothers released a public letter to our movement in late May asking for our support in seeking their freedom from the CoreCivic prison in San Diego and in holding those responsible for their incarceration accountable. CoreCivic also operates the largest family detention center in the country, the “baby jail” in Dilley, Texas opened in 2014, which CCA intended to make the first of many government-funded, privately-run internment camps on the border for immigrant families. In their prisons, CoreCivic is notorious for two particularly heinous practices. The first is intentionally cutting corners on emergency medical care for detainees, which has resulted in numerous deaths in detention, most recently of a trans woman who died of pneumonia after spending time in CoreCivic’s Cibola Detention Center in New Mexico. Here in Nashville, detainees know all about CoreCivic's medical negligence, and the public found out about it through the scabies epidemic in CoreCivic's Harding facility last year. CoreCivic also uses threats to force detainees to participate in a supposedly voluntary work program, in which detainees are paid $.25 an hour for six-hour shifts doing maintenance and other work inside the prison. The company has been sued by thousands of detainees for forced labor and trafficking in the last several years.Doing our part in Nashville means cutting off the spigot and refusing to allow CoreCivic to use Nashville's public funds and local jail as a gold mine off of which to get rich and to continue abusing immigrant families and other people in their custody.
----------------------- Español-------------------------------------------------------
En todo el pais, activistas están juntando para exigir la abolición de ICE, una agencia racista que existe para terrorizar, encarcelar, y deportar a inmigrantes y gente de color y los que se oponen a la administración. La realidad cruel se ha revelado más claramente en semanas recientes, con el Orden Ejecutivo del Presidente que pretende formar una red de campamentos de concentración manejados por el ejército para detener a familias migrantes sin límite en la frontera, incluso familias que son atrapadas en redadas aquí en el interior del país. En Nashville, necesitamos rechazar el uso de nuestros recursos locales para las campañas de ICE de limpieza étnica y separación familiar. CoreCivic es la compañía más grande de cárceles privados en el mundo, y utiliza su influencia y riqueza para pasar leyes que mantienen la gente encerrada con sentencias más largas, menos reglas contra el maltrato de detenidos, y leyes contra inmigrantes como lo de Arizona (SB1070) en 2010. CoreCivic ha pronunciado públicamente de que cualquier disminución de la población encarcelada va a bajar sus ganancias y dañar su modelo de negocio, y ellos gastan cantidades tremendas de dinero donando a políticos y organizaciones comunitarias que tienen influencia sobre políticas de encarcelación. Actualmente CoreCivic está manejando docenas de cárceles privados para inmigrantes adultos, incluso el Centro de Detención Otay Mesa (San Diego) y el Centro de Detención Familiar Hutto (Tejas), donde muchas mamás cuyos hijos les fueron quitados en la frontera actualmente se encuentran encarceladas. Un grupo de estas mamás publicaron una carta a nuestro movimiento en Mayo, pidiendo nuestro apoyo en su lucha buscando libertad de la cárcel de CoreCivic en San Diego y denunciando los responsables. CoreCivic también maneja el centro de detención para familias mas grande en el país, la “cárcel de bebés” en Dilley, Tejas, construido en 2014, lo cuál CCA pensaba hacer el primero de muchos campamentos de concentración, pagados por el gobierno y manejados por compañías privadas, en la frontera sur. En Nashville, tenemos que cortar los fondos públicos de que CoreCivic sigue aprovechando, y rechazar que esta corporación sigue usando la cárcel local como una mina de oro con lo cual pueden enriquecerse y seguir abusando de las familias migrantes y otros bajo su control.