A federal judge's husband was buying private prison stock as she was putting immigrants behind bars

Rss@dailykos.com (gabe Ortiz) · Thursday, August 24, 2017, 2:13 pm

The brutal 2008 Postville, Iowa, immigration raid that resulted in the arrests of nearly 400 immigrant workers remains one of the largest—and cruelest—raids in U.S. history. Women locked themselves in restrooms to hide while others ran into nearby cornfields to escape federal immigration agents. Families were broken and torn apart as frantic parents called friends to beg them to watch over their children. “They rounded us up toward the middle like a bunch of chickens,” recalled one worker, among the many transported to Waterloo for processing at a converted fairground.

There, hundreds of these undocumented immigrant workers were convicted to months in federal prison in a subsequent “judicial assembly line” that immigrant rights leader Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called “a cattle auction, not a criminal prosecution in the United States of America.” It was a “cattle auction” overseen by chief judge of the Northern District of Iowa Linda R. Reade who, according to an investigation from Mother Jones, was sentencing immigrants as her husband was purchasing stock in private prison companies:

Yet amid the national attention, one fact didn’t make the news: Before and after the raid, Reade’s husband owned stock in two private prison companies, and he bought additional prison stock five days before the raid, according to Reade’s financial disclosure forms. Ethics experts say these investments were inappropriate and may have violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

Reade’s husband bought between $30,000 and $100,000 worth of additional CCA and GEO Group stock five days before the Postville raid, according to her financial disclosure forms. When he sold his prison stocks about five months later, they were collectively worth between $65,000 and $150,000. He bought more CCA stock in November 2008 and more GEO Group stock in March 2009 and held them until February 2011. (A request for Reade’s financial disclosures from 2013 to the present has not yet been fulfilled.) Reade’s disclosure forms show that she and her husband did not buy any other stocks during the month of the raid.

“I don’t think a judge who handles criminal cases should ever be buying and selling stocks in private prisons,” says Richard Flamm, an ethics expert on judicial disqualification. “And of course, if her spouse does it, it’s functionally the same thing.”

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