“We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny.”
“In Russia, police tell us, ‘We are the law, as we say goes.’ We came here, and they tell us exactly the same thing.”
NBC news’ Mike Hixenbaugh attributes these quotes to a Russian man named Nikita, whose last name is withheld because he fears retaliation if he is forced to return to his home country, Russia. Nikita, his wife Oksana, and their three children ages 13, 12, and 4, fled Russia for fear that Vladimir Putin’s brutal régime would retaliate against them over Nikita’s anti-war activism. Following both international and U.S. law intended to protect political asylum seekers, they presented themselves at the U.S. border and requested asylum. An asylum judge agreed that the threat against them was credible.
Under most previous non-Trump administrations, the family would likely have been allowed to live freely in the U.S. while awaiting their hearing. Instead, as of the time of NBC’s article, they had been living in the Dilley Detention Center for 131 days, which is more than six times the length the law states the government is allowed to keep children in immigration detention.
Hixenbaugh summarizes the conditions they live with at Dilley: “Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill.” The couple’s 12-year-old may permanently lose the hearing in one ear due to poor medical treatment.
The article notes that CoreCivic, the private company running the prison, defers all questions to DHS. Dilley, CoreCivic, and DHS all have one thing in common: they are beyond reform. They need to be shut down.
Some context I could find on CoreCivic:
from late 2025: https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2025/10/06/corecivic-300-million-ice-contracts/
also from late 2025: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2025/08/19/corecivic-damon-hininger-ice-immigration/85723038007/
What a shock that the previous CEO started out as working for the prison system and became a CEO of a company profiting off of it. Something something revolving door.
Capitalist profit language in service of a manufactured rise in imprisoning people is some wild shit to read. It still boggles my mind that for-profit prisons are even a thing.
I used to think that for-profit prisons are the problem but looking the industry as a whole it is significantly a state system. I now think the prison industry (state or private) in the West is the outgrowth of having a capitalist "middle class" - for example here it is the average white US American and their co-westerners as a class that has helped with the the formation of the prison indusry as we know it now. It is an extension of the civil society and their lynching of black and native peoples in the formation of the US.
You make a good point. I was kinda second-guessing emphasizing that part. The US would still be a nightmare prison complex with or without for-profit prisons, of that I'm sure. I do think there is something distinct, though, about formally tying market profit motives to putting people in prison and keeping them there.
I'll be honest this way of thinking I have pointed is relatively new for me - as I am learning more as an ML, or more accurately understanding more clearly from a DM perspective certain leftovers I have assumed as left-liberal aren't necessarily so cut and dry. I wonder if many of the X-industry-complexes have similar aetiolgies; rather than a tiny elite extracting surplus value it is a whole system of bourgoisie + petty-bourgoisie + borugoisie proleteriat that benefit from the exploitation; the content/essence is capitalism but the form might be private or public, state or civil society.
(Another one is western intelligence services like the CIA - rather than a small groups controlling things from behind the scenes they are instead the vanguards of the masses of bourgoisie society made up of the above three groups).