What's the difference between a civil detention and a criminal detention? Smells Like Gitmo.

Detaining families is the logical, if extreme, result of U.S. immigration policy. While attention has been directed toward hard-line enforcement strategies - the deployment of National Guard troops to the southwestern border, ICE's sensationalistic raids on undocumented workers, and the vigilantism of groups like the Minutemen - a vast network of immigrant jails has emerged to facilitate this crackdown. Hutto is but the latest example.

The number of beds reserved by ICE for noncitizens has exploded, from fewer than 7,500 in 1994 to 26,500 today. Sometime this year the number is expected to reach 32,000. The private prison industry has absorbed almost all of the growth in new detention beds, as the federal government has moved away from managing its own facilities. Just in the past year, GEO Group opened a 1,900-bed ICE facility in Pearsall, Texas; CCA unveiled the 1,524-bed Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia; and Management and Training Corporation built a 2,000-bed tent city in Raymondville, Texas. In January 2006, Homeland Security awarded KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, a contract worth up to $385 million to build temporary immigrant detention facilities in case of an 'emergency influx of immigrants,' according to a KBR press release.

Private prison companies control about 20% of federal prison and detention beds, up from 3% in 2001, according to George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group. 'That's a remarkable turnaround,' he told analysts in a 2006 conference call. Zoley attributed the boom to the federal government's appetite for locking up immigrants.

And because the average stay in ICE detention is short (about 40 days and falling), the number of people moving through the detention system is vast - 230,000 each year and growing. This does not include the increasing number of noncitizens charged with federal immigration crimes who cram the dockets of border courthouses, a population that is helping to fuel the parallel explosion in U.S. Marshals Service jails. (The Marshals Service holds accused criminals awaiting adjudication.)....

Those detained in the immigration crackdown thus face the same legal limbo as do their counterparts from the war on terror. In a legal sense, 'detention' is not a punitive measure; it is not, strictly speaking, 'incarceration.' But for detainees, this is a distinction without a difference. They are not being charged with a crime yet are still effectively serving time. 'My clients repeatedly express that-"Why am I being treated like a criminal?'" says Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney. Depending on their circumstances, detainees may have little access to immigration court. If they do, they must represent themselves before a hostile judge from the Justice Department, because they have no right to a government-paid attorney.

The line between 'corrections' and 'detention' is further blurred by the nature of the facilities. At least 80% of ICE beds for immigrants are located in local and state jails, many privately operated, as well as in for-profit detention centers.

'Whenever we talk about immigrant detention, we hear that it's civil detention, not criminal detention. But they're housed in places that look and smell like a jail,' says Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyer's Guild. 'People are suffering violations that almost amount to constitutional violations of their rights. And when that happens, detention becomes punitive.'