Fact-checking Biden’s promise to close ICE detention centers run by private companies

” No company should benefit from the anguish of desperate people fleeing murder”, Biden promised.

Prosecutors with the Washington-based American Immigration Council&nbsp, said in an evaluation at the time that Biden’s program called for ending deals with secret detention services.

Biden signed an executive order a day after taking office in 2021 that forbade the attorney general from renewing deals with exclusive legal detention facilities that were related to the Bureau of Prison but no immigration enforcement.

That professional attempt had no bearing on immigration confinement features, which are run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Additionally, the White House introduced an immigration bill in 2021 that may grow the methods for tracking immigrants who are detained in the country through Alternatives to Detention.

In a letter to the DHS in May, 10 separate and political senators urged the government to stop operating privately operated detention features, increasing the pressure on the Democrat White House.

” Today, ICE imprisons between 36, 000 and 40, 000 people, 91 percent of whom are held in private incarceration services”, the senators wrote in the email.

Detention Watch Network, a member of the International Detention Coalition, a team that opposes the detention of refugees, cited numerous federal contractors as being the most heavily relied upon for their confinement.

” The best-known companies are The GEO Group, Inc. ( GEO ) and CoreCivic ( formerly the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA ) ), although there are a handful of other smaller companies as well”, the Detention Watch Network states on its website. They jointly manage and benefit from 79 percent of confinement rooms. This is a major growth over the previous year, when they ran 49 percent of incarceration beds.

Following the release of a disturbing NPR report midway through the year 2023 that exposed the brutal medical, mental, and physical conditions that immigrants endured while under national surveillance, immigration lawyers and civil rights organizations are angry with the Biden administration.

Some Democrats are currently discussing this Biden campaign promise as Vice President Kamala Harris attempts to take over as president. Given the failure of the current administration to fulfill its promise, Biden may not be silent on the matter. As president, the Harris plan did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would stop deals with private immigration detention services.

Did Biden fulfill his promise?

When Biden took office, ICE housed unlawful immigrants in 202 facilities across the country, according to data provided by ICE.

As of March 31, 2024, ICE was cover refugees in 139 services across the country.

But, ICE repeatedly requested details on how many for-profit features it had shut down during that time.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, ICE operated 14 detention services through for-profit companies as of the end of October, 2020, which included services owned and operated by private individuals. In January 2021, the Biden-Harris leadership took office.

The 14 for-profit services were only a part of the 202 services where ICE housed immigrant inmates nationwide, including services owned and operated by a state or local authorities, the U. S. Marshals Service, or ICE itself.

A look at publicly accessible ICE statistics showed that 13 privately run facilities,” deal detention service” centers, continued to be in activity.

Those services 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 Facility in Texas, the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in California, the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility 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.

According to an analysis conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union next year, about 90 % of immigrants detained by ICE were in privately run facilities, which meant that the for-profit services were much larger in size than local prison that ICE properly have partnerships with to house a small number of people. A request for comment was never received by the ACLU.

As of last quarter, all services housed almost 36, 000 people, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data center out of Syracuse University in New York.

Alexandra Wilkes, a spokesperson for the&nbsp, Day 1 Alliance, a trade association representing private-sector companies for&nbsp, ICE, said Democrats and Republicans had relied on outdoor organizations for four years because the state was not able to on its own.

” Which private detention facilities would keep a significant hole in our immigration technique,” he said. According to Wilkes, those who enter the country illegally are likely to be housed in packed jails or deported even more quickly into their neighborhoods than they are today. We require detention capacity in order to have a functioning immigration system that does n’t overburden our communities and instead ensures that every immigrant receives humane care and legal due process.

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Wilkes added that its services include storage for healthcare services, fun space, and online courthouses.

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