Old Contract With GEO Group May Tie Karnes County's Hands Over Family Immigration Prison Expansion

"On Thursday afternoon, the Karnes County Commissioners Court, which normally meets before a handful of citizens, moved its meeting to an overflow room.  The meeting was unusually well-attended because the county’s residents need to decide — and decide fast — whether their county will be home to one of the nation’s largest family detention centers.

Karnes City, an hour southeast of San Antonio, already hosts the Karnes County Residential Center, an immigrant detention facility run by the private prison corporation GEO Group, Inc., with a capacity of 532 beds.  Until July, the detention center was an all-male facility, but after this summer’s influx of asylum-seeking Central American women and children at the border, it’s been converted into a detention center for families.  In the next year, GEO wants to expand the facility to more than 1,100 beds.

Karnes County has a population of just 15,081 people.  For decades, its residents have eked out a living with dry-land farming or work at the county’s two prisons.  GEO Group acquired the Karnes facility in the late 90s.  At the time, county leaders were desperate for the jobs.  But now Karnes is at the center of the Eagle Ford Shale play, and a booming fracking economy that’s made millionaires of local landowners.  These days, a resident can make $100,000 a year working in the oil fields.  Suddenly Karnes County isn’t so desperate for jobs; that makes the Karnes facility expansion, from 532 to more than 1,100 beds, a harder sell for GEO Group.

... Afterward, the County Attorney Herb Hancock told me it would be difficult for the county to deny GEO Group the expansion. A 2006 contract with GEO left the county open to a breach of contract lawsuit if it didn’t agree to the expansion." - Melissa del Bosque, The Texas Observer, Dec. 6, 2014.