Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

After spending months firing federal workers, slashing public services, gutting healthcare, and raising taxes for everyone but the rich, our country just wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a detention center in Florida.

Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, it’s nothing more than a collection of tents on an old airstrip in a swamp. It has already flooded. It cost $450 million. For reference, that’s what it costs to build a skyscraper in New York City. While the State of Florida paid out for it, they plan to get refunded from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. In other words: you’re paying for it.

Maybe we should have built a skyscraper full of apartment buildings to house immigrants while their paperwork and legal proceedings unfold. (At least it wouldn’t flood.) Or we could have let them stay in their homes, working their jobs and taking care of their kids. (And paying taxes – because contrary to popular view, most undocumented immigrants pay taxes.)

But I digress. The point is: Alligator Alcatraz is a waste of money. And it’s the tip of the iceberg. The $170 billion in the new budget bill to expand ICE and immigration enforcement is the most wasteful government program ever designed. Around 63 percent of immigrants taken by ICE had no criminal record and 93 percent of them committed no violent crimes. They’re not causing problems to you or anyone else. But now it’s costing us around $245 per day to detain them in terrible conditions.

Why don’t we just let them stay at home? Wouldn’t it be easier to just knock on their doors when our backlogged courts are ready to handle their cases?

Or better yet, why don’t we just have a simpler and more streamlined naturalization process?

But what about the criminals, you say? We already have an entire criminal justice system and around 18,000 police........

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