DHS overpays for private prison, making a mockery of Team Trump’s rhetoric about ‘waste’: During her troubled tenure as the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem prioritized the purchase of warehouses, which she intended to use to detain and effectively imprison undocumented immigrants. That plan did not go well: In June, a few months after Noem’s departure, the Department of Homeland Security decided to abandon seven of the warehouses, which were vacant.
By all appearances, the incident pointed to an important example of the Department of Homeland Security misusing public resources — which looked even worse two months later when the public learned that the agency also spent nearly a half-billion dollars on a no-bid contract for several used airplanes that went largely unused. The no-bid contract went to a company whose chairman donated to a political committee aligned with Noem.
Late last week, this ugly pattern got messier still when we learned about the story of the Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota.
Last year, a private prison company called CoreCivic reached out to the Minnesota Department of Corrections with an offer: The state could buy the long-shuttered detention facility for $75 million.
Officials in Minnesota declined, concluding it did not need and could not afford the prison, although things apparently worked out quite well for CoreCivic anyway. The New York Times reported:
Last summer, to their astonishment, the 1,600-bed prison sold for more than $495 million. The buyer: the Department of Homeland Security.
“The price tag is so different than the conversations we were having last year,” said Safia Khan, the deputy commissioner and chief of staff for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It was a shock.”
The Times’ report added that CoreCivic, which received nearly seven times the amount of money it had sought from the state of Minnesota a year earlier, “donated $500,000 to President Trump’s inauguration committee” after the Republican’s 2024 victory.
Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, Keith… https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/prairie-correctional-facility-prison-minnesota-dhs-bessent