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The judge sentenced him to four years in federal prison. When FagardoSaucedo arrived at Reeves. a prison complex in rural West Texas. he entered a littleknown segment of the federal prison system. Over the previous decade. elected officials and federal agencies had quietly recast the relationship between criminal justice and immigration enforcement. These changes have done as much to bloat the federal prison population as the War on Drugs. they have also helped make Latinos the largest racial or ethnic group sentenced to federal custody. Until the 1990s. border crossing was almost always treated as a civil offense. punishable by deportation. But in the late 1980s. Congress started to change that. By 1996. crossing the border after deportation was punishable by years of imprisonment. with enhanced sentences for people previously convicted of crimesmost often drug offenses. Though federal investigators have found no evidence that criminalization has reduced the pace of border crossings over the long term. prosecutions for illegal entry and reentry rose from fewer than 4.000 a year at the start of Bill Clintons presidency. to 31.000 in 2004 under George W. Bush. to a high of 91.000 in 2013 under President Obama. By the late 1990s. the flood of inmates from this new class of prisoner. coupled with a raging War on Drugs. sent the Bureau of Prisons searching for places to put them. The BOP turned to private companies to operate a new type of facility. lowsecurity prisons designed to hold only noncitizens convicted of federal crimes. As of June 2015. these facilitieswhich are distinct from immigration detention centers. where people are held pending deportationhoused nearly 23.000 people. Three private companies now run 11 immigrantonly contract prisons. Five are run by the GEO Group. four by the Corrections Corporation of America. and two by a privately held company called the Management & Training Corporation. (A third MTC prison was recently shut down after inmates ransacked it in a protest.) Except for a prison largely used to house inmates from Washington. DC. these 11 facilities are the only privately run prisons in the federal criminaljustice system.