(C) Common Dreams
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Unchecked Growth: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention, Three Years Into the Biden Administration [1]
['Eunice Cho', 'Senior Staff Attorney', 'Aclu National Prison Project']
Date: 2023-08-07 14:36:18+00:00
Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system. As the ACLU has documented before, the federal government’s immigration detention system overwhelmingly relies on private prison corporations. Private prison corporations, like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have pocketed billions from ICE detention contracts in the past two decades. As a candidate, President Biden promised to stop the use of private prison companies for immigration detention. In 2021, he announced that there should be “no private prisons, period,” when addressing protesters demanding the end to immigration detention. Although the Biden administration issued an executive order in January 2021 directing the Department of Justice to phase out its contracts with private prison companies, it notably excluded ICE detention from the order. Since then, the number of immigrants detained by ICE — and revenues for private prison companies — have only increased.
The Number of Immigrants Detained Under the Biden Administration Continues to Grow
As of July 2023, ICE detains on average 30,003 people each day. This is a significant increase from the start of the Biden administration in January 2021, when ICE held an average of 15,444 people in detention each day.
The Biden Administration Increasingly Relies on Private Prison Corporations to Detain Immigrants: Nine Out of Ten People in ICE Detention Are Now Held in Private Prison Facilities
Under the Trump administration, 81 percent of people detained each day in January 2020 were held in facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations. In the first two years of the Biden administration, this number remained relatively unchanged. In September 2021, 79 percent of people detained each day in ICE custody were held in private detention facilities. In the last two years, however, this number has markedly increased: as of July 2023, 90.8 percent of people detained in ICE custody each day are held in detention facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations.
Private Prison Corporation Revenues from ICE Detention Have Skyrocketed
Contracts for ICE detention continue to make up a significant amount of revenue for private prison corporations like the GEO Group and CoreCivic. In 2022, the GEO Group made $1.05 billion in revenue from ICE detention contracts alone, or 43.9 percent of its total revenue ($2.4 billion). CoreCivic similarly made $552.2 million in revenue from ICE detention contracts in 2022, representing 30 percent of its total revenue. Despite calls from advocates to decrease funding for ICE detention, Congress appropriated $2.9 billion dollars to hold 34,000 people in ICE detention each day for FY 2023.
The Biden Administration Has Failed to Reverse the Trump Administration’s Expansion of Immigration Detention, As Abuses in ICE Detention Continue
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[1] Url:
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/unchecked-growth-private-prison-corporations-and-immigration-detention-three-years-into-the-biden-administration
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