The Cotton and the Cage

usapolitics.news  Analytical Journalism

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"The duty of government is to protect the weak against the strong." — Andrew Jackson, 1832 Known as Sharp Knife by the Cherokee Nation.

In 1983, three men incorporated a company in Nashville, Tennessee. One was Thomas Beasley, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. One was Robert Crants, a real estate financier. The third was T. Don Hutto, president-elect of the American Correctional Association — a man who, according to a 2018 Time investigation, had previously run a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay.

They called their company Corrections Corporation of America. Today it is called CoreCivic. It operates the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas — the largest family immigration detention facility in the United States — under a five-year federal contract worth $160 million annually. Inside, as of this writing, approximately 2,400 people are detained, the majority of them women and children.

The population has changed. The financial logic has not.

Chattel slavery was abolished in 1865. Within years, Southern states had developed convict leasing — the practice of arresting Black men on minor or fabricated charges and renting them to plantations and industry for profit. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, contained an explicit exception for persons convicted of a crime, and that exception was the hinge on which the system turned. Convict leasing was eventually abolished under sustained pressure in the early twentieth century, replaced by chain gangs, then by the modern prison system, then by its privatization. Each iteration updated the mechanism. None of them altered the underlying logic: that captive human beings can be monetized on government contract, and that the contract is more durable than the population it confines.

The pattern is older than convict leasing. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, initiating the forced displacement of the Cherokee and other Indigenous nations from their ancestral lands. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation had sovereign rights and that Georgia's laws had no force on Cherokee territory. Jackson's administration ignored the ruling. The removal proceeded. Thousands died on what the Cherokee called the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee called Jackson Sharp Knife — and still do. What Sharp Knife established was not merely a policy but a precedent: that a president could defy a court order to remove a population he had decided did not belong, and that the legal architecture surrounding the removal would be constructed to make it appear orderly and authorized. The people being removed were not consulted. They are still not consulted.

T. Don Hutto did not invent that logic. He inherited it, practiced it, and then incorporated it. The company he co-founded now holds children.

The children at Dilley are not convicted of anything. They are not charged with anything. Immigration detention is classified as civil, not criminal, which means the constitutional protections that attach to criminal incarceration do not formally apply. The government detains them pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts that are not Article III courts, staffed by judges who report to the same Justice Department that prosecutes the cases before them. The backlog in those courts runs to years. Some families waive their rights simply to end the detention. The system classifies that as a voluntary decision.

What the system produces at Dilley is documented. A joint investigation by Human Rights First and RAICES, published in April 2026 and based on extensive interviews with families held between April 2025 and February 2026, found that inhumane conditions, routine mistreatment, and due process violations are pervasive and systemic. Children and parents have limited access to clean water, nutritious food, sleep, and personal hygiene. Verbal abuse by ICE agents and staff is routine. Medical care is unreliable. In January 2026, a five-year-old U.S. citizen named Liam Conejo Ramos was detained at Dilley with his father, taken from a running car in his family's driveway in Minnesota, his school superintendent later describing federal agents as having used him as bait to lure his father. His health deteriorated inside the facility. A judge ordered his release. The same weekend, ICE locked down Dilley after measles began spreading through the population.

In February 2026, ProPublica published letters written by detained children. They described missing friends and teachers, falling behind at school, unreliable medical care, and fear about what comes next. After the letters circulated publicly, guards seized drawing supplies, letters and drawings, and restricted access to email. A 13-year-old detained at Dilley attempted suicide. She was subsequently deported to Colombia.

ICE's official response, published in February 2026, described Dilley as purpose-built to ensure families are comfortable, with medical care, educational services, and recreational opportunities. ICE Director Todd Lyons stated that detention is not punitive. The facility, he said, is not a correctional center.

The Flores Settlement Agreement, a federal consent decree dating to 1997, sets minimum standards for the treatment of migrant children in government custody, including limits on the length of time children can be detained. Amnesty International's current urgent action campaign on Dilley states that families are being held for weeks in violation of those limits, that most never speak with an attorney or appear before a judge before deportation, and that people with chronic health conditions have been denied necessary care.

Here is who profits from this. CoreCivic is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Its two largest institutional shareholders are BlackRock, holding roughly sixteen percent of shares, and Vanguard Group, holding nearly twelve percent — together accounting for more than a quarter of the company. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset managers on earth. Public pension funds — retirement systems for workers in Kentucky, Texas, Oregon, Virginia, New Jersey, and Illinois — are also investors. The teachers and public employees of those states are, without necessarily knowing it, financially invested in the detention of migrant children in Texas.

The $160 million that CoreCivic receives annually to operate Dilley comes from federal appropriations — from taxpayers. It flows through the company's revenue line, past operating costs that include the guards who seized the children's drawings, and out to shareholders whose quarterly statements do not mention measles or suicide attempts or a five-year-old U.S. citizen held until a judge intervened.

In 2021, CoreCivic paid $56 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit that accused the company of inflating its stock price. The lawsuit alleged that CoreCivic ran unsafe, low-quality prisons that caused multiple deaths and did not save money. The settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing. The contract with ICE continued. The five-year renewal was signed in 2025.

T. Don Hutto died in 2010. The institution he helped build is larger than it has ever been. The current ICE detention population — up to 73,000 people on an average day — is the largest in the agency's history. In 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year since the early 2000s. At least 14 people died in the first two and a half months of 2026.

The plantation is gone. The cotton is gone. What remains is the contract, the captive population, and the profit.

What it is: a system in which the government pays a private company to hold human beings — many of them children, none of them convicted of anything — in conditions that multiple independent investigators have described as inhumane, and in which that company's profits flow to the largest asset managers in the world, underwritten by the retirement savings of American workers who are never asked whether they consent to this use of their money.

T. Don Hutto ran a plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay. His co-founders incorporated that logic into a company. That company holds a five-year federal contract. The contract runs through 2030.

Sources

Human Rights First and RAICES. "Inhumane Conditions, Routine Mistreatment and Due Process Violations at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center." April 1, 2026.

ProPublica. Investigation into treatment of children at the South Texas Family Residential Center, including letters from detained children. February 9, 2026.

Amnesty International. Urgent Action: "USA: Shut Down Migrant Family Detention Center." 2026.

Global Detention Project. South Texas Family Residential Centre profile. 2026.

Wikipedia. "CoreCivic." Updated 2026.

Wikipedia. "South Texas Family Residential Center." Updated April 2026.

Texas Tribune. "Judges order El Gamal family's release after 10 months in Dilley." April 20, 2026.

Baptist News Global. "New report says Dilley Detention Center is an American horror story." April 13, 2026.

Houston Public Media / Texas Public Radio. "Protest breaks out at South Texas immigration detention facility holding 5-year-old Liam Ramos." January 25, 2026.

ICE. "Debunking the mainstream media lies about South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas." February 25, 2026.

Time Magazine. Investigation into T. Don Hutto. 2018.

CoreCivic. SEC filing DEF 14A, FY2026.

CoreCivic shareholder data. WallStreetZen, TickerGate, Fintel. 2026.