Unchecked Growth: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention, Three Years Into the Biden Administration ( www.aclu.org )

Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system.

As the ACLU has documented before, the federal government’s immigration detention system overwhelmingly relies on private prison corporations. Private prison corporations, like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have pocketed billions from ICE detention contracts in the past two decades.

As a candidate, President Biden promised to stop the use of private prison companies for immigration detention. In 2021, he announced that there should be “no private prisons, period,” when addressing protesters demanding the end to immigration detention.

Although the Biden administration issued an executive order in January 2021 directing the Department of Justice to phase out its contracts with private prison companies, it notably excluded ICE detention from the order. Since then, the number of immigrants detained by ICE — and revenues for private prison companies — have only increased.