Verification of Biden’s promise to close private ICE detention centers

What did Biden promise?

As a presidential candidate in 2020, Biden pledged to end contracts with federal contractors that were for-profit businesses, raking in $500 million to $1 billion annually starting in 2022.

“No company should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence,” Biden vowed.

Lawyers for the Washington-based American Immigration Council said in an analysis at the time that Biden’s plan called for ending contracts with private detention centers.

Days after taking office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing the attorney general not to renew Justice Department contracts with private criminal detention facilities, those related to the Bureau of Prisons, not the immigration application.

That executive order had nothing to do with immigration detention facilities, managed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The White House also introduced an immigration bill in 2021 that would expand ways to track immigrants into the country without detaining them, known as Alternatives to Detention.

In May, 10 Democratic and independent senators wrote to DHS and called on the government to withdraw the privately run detention facilities, increasing pressure on the Democratic White House.

“Today, ICE detains between 36,000 and 40,000 people, 91 percent of whom are held in private detention facilities,” the senators wrote in the letter.

The Detention Watch Network, part of the International Detention Coalition, a group that advocates against jailing people for immigration offenses, noted that several government contractors are most trusted to detain immigrants.

“The best-known companies are The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)), although there are also a handful of smaller companies,” the Detention Watch Network states in the your website. “Together they administer and benefit 79 percent of detention beds. This is a significant expansion from 2009, when they operated 49 percent of detention beds.”

Immigration lawyers and civil rights groups are furious with the Biden administration after the release of an NPR report in mid-2023 that exposed horrific medical, mental and physical experiences immigrants endured while under surveillance federal

That Biden campaign promise is one that few Democrats are talking about now, as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to succeed Biden, who is possibly staying silent on the issue given that the current administration is not following through on his promise. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would end contracts with private immigration detention centers as president.

Did Biden keep his promise?

Information provided by ICE revealed that when Biden took office, ICE housed illegal immigrants in 202 facilities across the country.

As of March 31, 2024, ICE housed immigrants in 139 facilities across the country.

However, ICE did not respond to multiple requests for a breakdown of how many or which for-profit facilities it had closed in that time.

A Government Accountability Office report found that ICE operated 14 detention centers through for-profit contractors, facilities owned and operated by private companies as of fiscal year 2020, which end on October 31, 2020. The Biden-Harris administration took office in January 2021.

The 14 for-profit facilities were just a fraction of the 202 facilities where ICE housed immigrant detainees across the country, including facilities owned and operated by a state or local government, the Marshals Service of the US or ICE itself.

A look at publicly available ICE data showed that 13 privately run facilities, “contract detention centers,” continued to operate.

These facilities included the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Colorado, the Desert View Annex in California, the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey, the Golden State Annex in California, the Houston Contract Detention Center in Texas, the Imperial Regional Detention Center in California, the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in California, the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Texas, the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California, the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Texas, and the Tacoma ICE Processing Center in Washington.

About 90% of immigrants detained by ICE were held in private facilities, meaning that the for-profit facilities were far larger than the local jails that ICE could have agreements with to house them some people, according to an analysis last year by ICE. American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU did not respond to a request for comment.

Last month, all the facilities housed about 36,000 people, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data center at Syracuse University in New York.

Alexandra Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the Day 1 Alliance, a trade association that represents private-sector contractors for ICE, said Democrats and Republicans had relied on outside firms for four decades because the government couldn’t do it on its own .

“Not having privately contracted detention centers would leave a huge hole in our immigration system. Those who enter the country illegally will likely be housed in overcrowded prisons or released directly into communities even more than now,” Wilkes wrote in an email “We need detention capacity so that we can have a properly functioning immigration system that does not overwhelm our communities and instead ensures that all immigrants receive humane care and due process.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Wilkes added that its facilities include space for health services, recreational spaces and online courts.

The White House and Harris’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment.