Houston, TX - In a business park aptly named Export Plaza, Corrections Corporation of America runs a complex of concrete buildings surrounded by razor wire. It’s here where immigrants, like Sergia Santibanez, are locked up until they agree to leave the country.

“When you first get there, they tell you you’re nobody,” said Santibanez, who spent 16 months there. She still breaks into tears whenever she recalls the experience.

In 2005, the mother of three U.S.-born children was giving several people a ride outside of Austin, where she had been living as legal resident since the 1980s. She got into an accident, and when the police came, she was arrested and eventually convicted for transporting undocumented immigrants, an aggravated felony that revoked her legal status. She served four months in a federal prison before ending up at CCA’s Houston Processing Center while the court decided whether she should be deported.

“There, it was worse,” Santibanez said. “They told you that you had to put up with it because we came to them, not them to us, and so we didn’t have a right to anything.”

Private detention centers – most of which are operated by CCA – are key to the federal government’s goal of “ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens,” which are estimated to total about 12 million.

“When people are out on the street they are able to work and hire lawyers to represent them in the removal process,” observed Judy Greene, a criminal justice analyst. “When they are behind bars, they are under pressure to be removed. After weeks and months they want to go home, and whether or not they have sufficient grounds for relief is irrelevant.”In August 2007, Santibanez agreed to be deported. “My lawyer had all kinds of reasons to keep fighting,” she said when contacted by phone in Mexico. “He asked me ‘are you sure you want that?’ And in the end, I was fed up and I signed."

Santibanez is one of a quarter million undocumented immigrants deported between October 2006 and September 2007 as part of “interior enforcement” – an intensified crackdown on illegal aliens already in the U.S that is taking place even as the government is conducting increased patrol of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Special law enforcement teams target those who have deportation orders pending, and states are receiving federal funds to comb prisons for “criminal aliens” and ensure they are deported once they serve their sentence. Nearly 80 percent of CCA's immigrant inmates come from interior enforcement carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Marshals Service. In all, CCA facilities house more than half of the immigrants currently detained in private facilities. Its competitors, Geo Group, Cornell Company and Avalon Correctional Services share the rest of the business, along with several other smaller companies.

The crackdown on immigrants began in 2003, but since there was not enough prison space to detain those issued deportation orders, the policy was “catch and release.” In 2005, after companies like CCA had been contracted to provide detention facilities, the policy shifted to “catch and return.” This has resulted in the jailing of hundreds of thousands of immigrants until they agreed to be deported. Today CCA is the leading provider of private prisons for undocumented immigrants.

"We’re here to take care of the product they deliver to us," said Michael Davis who doubles as the chaplain and spokesman for CCA's Houston Processing Center. "Until they’re deported we take care of the detainees the best we can.”

Most of CCA’s detention centers are like the Houston facility, which holds close to a thousand male and female detainees.

The site includes 19 “dorms” equipped with bunk beds in a building connected to an ICE administrative office, and two courtrooms. Detainees come from Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Tanzania, Nigeria, the Congo and the Philippines. Their average stay is two to three months.

Most of CCA’s detention centers are like the Houston facility, which holds close to a thousand male and female detainees.

The site includes 19 “dorms” equipped with bunk beds in a building connected to an ICE administrative office, and two courtrooms. Detainees come from Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Tanzania, Nigeria, the Congo and the Philippines. Their average stay is two to three months.

"As the months went by, she kept looking more depressed," said Luisanna. "The color of her skin started fading as she tried to survive prison life."

CCA declined to be interviewed or answer written questions for this story. The company rarely grants media requests for comments that could result in adverse publicity, and hurt its ability to obtain new contracts or lose existing contracts.

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