1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

Even with this administration doing its best to keep their abuses out of the public eye, we learn every day of new horrors in the detention camp archipelago. They’re overcrowded and unsanitary, the folks they’ve snatched off the street aren’t getting adequate food or water, they can’t get health care. Now, there’s even measles outbreaks. This is what we’re subjecting little children to. 35 people that we know of have died in immigration detention since Trump took office again, including at least one alleged to have been murdered by guards. These places are becoming black holes for basic rights and basic human decency. And in many cases, private companies are running these camps and making bank off of us to do it. CoreCivic has inked contracts to run detention facilities worth over $680 million in taxpayer dollars since last January. They reported $538 million in revenue in the second quarter last year, an almost 10 percent increase. Over the same period, GEO Group leapt 5% to make $632 million. They’ve been awarded more than $1 billion of our money for detention centers and services, all while we’re being told the government can’t afford to make health care and child care affordable. It’s obscene. While it is a challenge for state governments to effectively take on the deportation machine, there is one power that is clearly available to them: the ability to tax corporations doing business within our borders. We must make use of it. Innovative lawmakers and activists have proposed legislation, California’s AB1633, to aggressively tax the profits of privately-run detention centers and redirect those revenues to immigration-related services. This is a legally sound path towards holding companies accountable for what they’re doing in these camps, and it will help us get our money back to cover the costs of repairing the damage to our communities. Please support and help pass into law a detention camp profits tax in our state. CEOs and shareholders can’t be allowed to get rich off the taxpayers by locking up our friends and neighbors.