“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”
In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.
In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.
In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.
Topf and Sons constructed the ovens at Auschwitz; their management coordinated with the Nazis in depth, and their engineers visited and observed the holocaust in action so they could make the crematoria function more efficiently, for example installing ventilation fans so that the gas chambers could be flushed with outside air more quickly. The company continued in operation until 1996.
Degesch produced Zyklon B gas for extermination in the camps. They were requested to produce a special variant for use on humans, without the additives that would usually give it a strong smell to warn people of the danger. That variant is what is indicated by the “B” in the name. They are still around, having merged into Detia Freyberg GmbH.
I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of ICE agents on a stakeout recently, sitting in their car with the hazards on waiting to snatch someone. I did what I was doing and then came back to observe and see if I was right, but they were gone by the time I got back.