http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/opinion/the-jailing-of-illegal-immigrants.html 2016-09-07 20:22:43 The Jailing of Illegal Immigrants Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation writes about her magazine’s investigation into 11 privately run facilities. === To the Editor: Re “ I commend your bold stance against the imprisonment of undocumented immigrants. In the last several years, The Nation, in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, devoted serious resources to reporting on this matter and published a The report, which predated and substantiated the inspector general’s August findings, found that these facilities are a profligate waste of money and have been host to dozens of questionable deaths involving inadequate medical care. Further reporting, including thousands of pages of documents dislodged in an open-record lawsuit and interviews with former agency officials, revealed that the agency understood these dangers and deficiencies yet repeatedly renewed contracts with these facilities. Agency leadership reasoned that, since the United States planned to deport the inmates in these facilities, they didn’t deserve the basic standards of medical care and safety provided in publicly run facilities. Closing the Bureau of Prisons’ private facilities and the Department of Homeland Security’s detention centers is a start; reforming our broken immigration system so that these facilities aren’t needed in the first place would be a historic and overdue shift in policy. KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL New York The writer is editor and publisher of The Nation.