A Native American Tribe Has a $800 Million Contract to Run ICE Detention Centers

The Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, is currently holding many of the parents who have been separated from their kids. But while PIDC is owned by ICE, its guards are provided by a subsidiary of Ahtna, Inc., a portfolio of businesses operated by the Ahtna, a federally recognized Alaska Native people. The Ahtna, who have also run immigrant detention centers in New York, Florida, and Arizona in addition to Port Isabel, fall under the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) umbrella, and Ahtna, Inc. is an Alaska Native Regional Corporation established by Congress under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. A recent statement from the NCAI decried the Trump administration’s “forced separation of immigrant children from their families,” calling it “simply immoral” and a reminder of “a dark period for many Native American families.” “For decades, the U.S. government stole Native children from their parents and forced them into boarding schools hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away,” NCAI President Jefferson Keel said in the June 19 announcement. Ahtna, Inc.’s ongoing work for ICE at PIDC would seem to put it at odds with the NCAI, which calls itself “the oldest, largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization in the country.”...MORE