The Feds Could Stop Hiring Private Prison Companies to Detain Immigrants

The Department of Homeland Security is reconsidering its use of CCA and other prison companies.

A drawing by an immigrant child at CCA's T. Don Hutto Residential Center.ACLU

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will reexamine its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced today. The decision comes less than two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would close out its contracts with private prison companies, a decision that affects approximately 22,600 prisoners in 13 federal prisons.

Last Friday, Johnson directed an advisory council to evaluate whether DHS should “move in the same direction” as the Justice Department. The council is expected to report back by November 30.

If Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS division that controls migrant detention, were to end its contracts with for-profit prison companies, the decision could be more significant than the Justice Department’s announcement. While private prisons oversee about 12 percent of federal inmates, for-profit companies operate 46 ICE facilities and oversee a daily average of 24,567 people, or 73 percent of immigration detainees.

The Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, the country’s two largest for-profit prison companies, together control 8 of the country’s 10 biggest immigration detention centers. Both corporations’ stock prices took a severe hit after the Justice Department’s decision on August 18, and both are now facing class-action lawsuits from investors. Johnson’s announcement sent their stocks falling once again, with CCA slipping 9.4 percent and GEO falling 6 percent after the announcement.

ICE’s immigration detention capacity has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Private prisons have played a key role in expanding ICE’s capacity to hold migrants. For-profit prison operators controlled 62 percent of immigration detention beds in 2014, up from 25 percent in 2005. The rewards for private operators of immigration detention centers can be huge: Last year, CCA made 14 percent of its total revenue from one 2,400-bed facility, the South Texas Family Residential Center, after it obtained a four-year, $1 billion contract from ICE.

Today, ICE is required by law to fill an average of 34,000 beds daily, a requirement instituted in 2010, when former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) added the private detention quota to the DHS budget. As of December 2015, around 400,000 migrants were detained by ICE annually.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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