Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants

Geographers Hiemstra (Detain and Deport) and Conlon provide a revealing overview of the American business of for-profit migrant incarceration. Drawing from a wide array of sources—including interviews with lawyers and former detainees—the authors delineate the disturbing scope of the problem. The federal government pays “more than $3 billion per year to lock up... immigrants,” and while some of that funding goes to municipalities that host detention centers, the vast majority goes to the private companies who run them, such as GEO Group and CoreCivic, whose combined income from ICE contracts was over $1.5 billion in 2022. The profit incentive drives such firms to provide the cheapest possible services, like spoiled food (the authors describe meatballs that smell like feces) and to deny detainees medical care. Hiemstra and Conlonn trace how this corrupt system got started under Ronald Reagan, who began incarcerating some asylum seekers and made 10,000 detention beds permanently available, a windfall for “prison corporations’ army of lobbyists” who “collaborated with political representatives from places looking to host” detention centers, further “driving new policies and laws that made more immigrants detainable.” The authors forcefully argue that these detention centers, which saw a dramatic increase in the number of beds available under the Biden administration, from 15,000 to 40,000, must be decommissioned. This shines an urgent spotlight on an inhumane system. (June)