With the number of immigrants detained and deported from the U.S. at an all time high, Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines looked into the booming business of immigrant detention, the fastest growing form of incarceration in the country.

From Al Jazeera:

With the number of immigrants detained and deported from the U.S. at an all time high, Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines looked into the booming business of immigrant detention.

Every day, the US government detains more than 33,000 non-citizens at the cost of $5.5mn a day. That is a lot of money for the powerful private prison industry, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and now operates nearly half of the country’s immigration detention centres.

[Immigrant detainees] become a number: for law enforcement, a success story; and for the prison industry, a profit.

Under pressure from immigration advocates, the Obama administration has vowed to reform the immigrant detention system, recently opening a facility in Texas that was designed and built under a new set of guidelines intended to make detention for more humane.

Read the full story at Univision News