He added that numerous same companies the Justice Department flagged for operating unsafe prisons also run immigrant detention centers.
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Unlike the Department of Justice, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not maintain any of its own facilities. “These are just places that shouldn’t exist at all, but certainly shouldn’t be run by private prison corporations”.
The Department of Homeland Security is re-evaluating its use of contractors to oversee these facilities.
Jeh Johnson, U.S. Homeland Security secretary, has ordered a Department of Homeland Security advisory committee to evaluate whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement should end the use of private for-profit companies to operate detention centers to hold immigrants.
Immigrants’ rights activists, who have long viewed private prison companies as a key driver of growth for the immigrant detention system over the last two decades, cheered the decision. They house women and children taken into custody on the Texas-Mexico border, primarily during a 2014 surge in illegal immigration from Central America.
That was prompted by an inspector general’s report that criticized the safety and effectiveness of private prisons. GEO provides and monitors ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System tracking devices that approximately 50,000 undocumented immigrants are made to wear as an alternative to detention while they await court hearings.
The Department of Homeland Security is rethinking its reliance on for-profit prisons.
“These corporations continue to fight our clients at Detention Watch Network to keep the financial terms of their contracts with the government secret-they know that public awareness of how their profiteering works may undermine their enormous influence over detention policy, which has given them control over 62 percent of immigration detention beds”.
So it appears all the shoes haven’t yet dropped for Corrections Corp. of America and rival GEO Group. A report released past year by the organization Grassroots Leadership, which opposes prison profiteering, reveals that the for-profit prison industry in 2009 successfully pressured Congress to adopt the congressional immigrant detention quota, which today directs ICE to hold an average 34,000 people in detention on a daily basis.
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While the ultimate fate of private prisons in the USA is still unclear, Libal said for-profit detention is increasingly becoming a “mainstream issue”, and the upcoming DHS review could lead to even greater scrutiny of the industry. They hold about 22,000 inmates, who represent about 11% of the total federal prison population.
