President Joe Biden vowed to end the federal government’s use of private prisons on the campaign trail. His campaign platform further stated that “the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.” And in 2021, Biden stepped into office continuing to promise that he would address the human rights abuses that pervade the immigration detention system.
These promises were repeated but have so far proven to be empty.
After almost two full years in office, the Biden administration has nearly doubled the number of migrants it holds in immigration detention, with 30,000 migrants behind bars and with about 80% of them held in private facilities.
In January 2021, Biden issued an executive order meant to end the use of private detention facilities for those in federal criminal custody. The order directed the Department of Justice to not renew any contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities, and — similar to the order President Barack Obama passed at the end of his second term — the order fully excluded private immigration detention.
For that reason, what seemed like a first step in the right direction has instead turned out to be a driver for expanding private detention facilities on the immigration side. By excluding privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, Biden’s executive order incentivized private prison companies to replace expired contracts with the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Services with new ICE contracts. This happened in Moshannon, Pennsylvania, and ICE has actively adopted a policy to seek out expired contracts to expand its detention apparatus.
Beyond its failure to address private prisons in the immigration context, the order also failed to address the sprawling structure of contracts with local jails that detain immigrants for money from the federal government through Intergovernmental Support Agreements. Those contracts form a significant part of the immigration detention system. They are rife with the same abuses and driven by the same financial incentives as private prisons.
In truth, financial incentives underpin this country’s entire immigration detention system — whether the facilities are run by private companies or not. Some local governments choose to detain migrants to bolster and build their local budgets, molding their entire economies around the incarceration of migrants. And the incentive to detain the most people for the least amount of money possible has resulted in the horrific and widespread abuse and neglect documented in ICE detention centers across the country.
Steadily throughout the years, these insidious financial incentives have furthered the dehumanization of migrants, as private prisons and local governments alike are conditioned to see migrants as a source of income rather than as human beings, family members and critical members of our communities.
Whether through private prisons or contracts with local facilities, immigration detention is an abusive, inhumane and completely unnecessary practice — and a world without it is entirely possible.
Many people are surprised to learn that immigration detention as we know it is a relatively new practice. The origin of the detention system in the United States today began to expand in the 1980s along with the mass incarceration of Black and brown communities. As the United States expanded prisons in the 1980s and 1990s, the detention of immigrants, once a little-known practice, began to take shape and has since ballooned into the system we see today.
Regardless of who runs the facilities where immigrants are incarcerated, immigration detention is an inhumane practice that must be eradicated.
Immigration detention does nothing to build healthy communities; on the contrary, it endangers the lives of thousands of people every day and tears families and communities apart. The Biden administration has a moral imperative — and the power — to take tangible, concrete steps to make this future a reality. While recent shutdowns of some of the worst offender facilities have begun to happen, the president needs to make good on his promise to do more.
Sirine Shebaya is the executive director of the National Immigration Project. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.