Biden’s pledge to close private migrant prisons remains unfulfilled
President Biden vowed in his 2020 campaign to shutter forprofit migrant detention facilities; he repeated the promise after taking office. It hasn’t happened. To the contrary: Overwhelmed by the surge in unauthorized border-crossing, the administration now holds roughly 30,000 migrants in detention, roughly double the count it inherited from the Trump administration. Roughly 4 in 5 detainees are in private facilities overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
That’s a troubling development given ongoing reports of poor conditions and health care for migrant detainees. Even though the government has stopped housing migrants in some prisons with poor records, Mr. Biden’s promise to close down forprofit migrant detention should still be the goal.
In fact, the president issued an executive order soon after entering office to close down private prisons used to house other federal inmates. The rationale for closing them was the same as that for shifting away from private migrant prisons: the principle that incarcerating offenders is properly a government obligation, not an opportunity for profit.
If anything, the logic for ending private prisons for migrants is more compelling. Roughly 70% of migrant detainees have no criminal record; they face civil immigration proceedings, awaiting adjudication of their asylum and deportation cases. Many of the rest have been charged with relatively minor offenses, including traffic violations, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Only a modest number have committed serious crimes. In other words, few migrant detainees are dangerous.
Meanwhile, ICE supervises some 330,000 non-detained migrants using technological surveillance, more than twice the number in such programs two years ago. Most migrants not held in detention facilities — often undocumented families and minors — do show up for their immigration court hearings when summoned.
Those who are imprisoned in ICE facilities, including for-profit ones, are typically single adults. There can be no justification for subjecting them to the substandard conditions and abuse that has been reported at some facilities. Just this month, a bipartisan Senate committee issued an in-depth report concluding that dozens of women held at a for-profit immigration jail in rural Georgia were likely subjected to unwarranted gynecological procedures, including surgeries, by a non-board-certified physician who had previous legal issues. The problems at the Irwin County Detention Center involved what medical experts told the Senate panel was “aggressive and unethical” treatment. Shockingly, they lasted for three years, until 2020. And despite complaints from a whistleblower and immigrant advocates, the situation went unaddressed by ICE officials.
The government has stopped using the Irwin County facility to house migrants. Yet the Senate report is a reminder of a pattern of problems at migrant detention centers, and of the president’s failure to live up to his campaign promise.