As the upcoming election season approaches, there is constant talk about the crisis at the US-Mexico border from debate moderators, candidates running to be representatives and campaign volunteers on the issue of immigration.
In both the presidential debate and the vice presidential debate, both tickets heavily pushed language around immigration through a criminal lens, spreading a negative narrative about immigration and pushing a model of detention similar to that of criminal proceedings.
Privatized prison groups are heavily influencing the current elections and promoting immigration policies structured around criminality. Some of the most prominent groups are GEO Group and CoreCivic, which are also involved in running privatized prisons. CoreCivic and GEO Group have influential political action committees that work on lobbying and campaign funding initiatives to further their agenda.
GEO Group PAC, the political action committee associated with GEO Group, is currently contributing over 2 million dollars to contested electoral races, political action committees and outside groups; currently, 92.6% of electoral political contributions are to conservatives and the other 7.4% to moderate democrats, although this number fluctuates depending on the number contested seats in a particular election. Currently, GEO Group PAC has given $64,000 to former President Trump’s re-election campaign and $4,900 to Vice President Harris’s campaign.
One popular method of crimmigration, is introducing privatized models of detention centers, which would outsource many federal institutions detaining immigrants to privatized centers, which have “cheaper models” of business.
There is rarely any talk in mainstream media about the conditions within the detention centers and their practices. After the prolific expansion of detention centers under the Trump administration, continued under the Biden administration, there have been notable lawsuits against the corporations running these centers.
The practice of forced labor is currently upholding the privatized detention centers that manage most Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Still, it is important to note how explicitly they violate the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which prohibits forced labor practices.
Detainees in the custody of ICE allege they are forced into performing janitorial and managerial work. These alleged claims have been filed against various private prison systems, most notably GEO Group and Core Civics, formerly Corrections Corporation of America.
Plaintiffs in Menocal v. GEO Group filed a lawsuit claiming GEO Group forced detainees to work for either $1 a day or nothing to perform bathroom scrubbing, cleaning and maintaining medical facilities, perform clerical work for GEO, and prepare resources for new detainee intake.
According to Shoaib Ahmed, who sued Core Civic for forced working conditions, detainees were “forc[ed] to work through threats of physical violence, solitary confinement, and deprivation of basic need” if they refused to perform tasks. The detainees of the lawsuit say that the underpayment (or non-payment) is “unjustly enriching” the private prison companies.
In an investigation done by USA Today in 2019, they reported that “more than 400 allegations of sexual assault or abuse, inadequate medical care, regular hunger strikes, frequent use of solitary confinement, more than 800 instances of physical force against detainees, nearly 20,000 grievances filed by detainees and at least 29 fatalities, including seven suicides” occurred in the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined $985 million from profits tied to the privatization of detention centers. The conditions are frequently compared to forced labor in American prison systems. However, immigrants are legally given protection from forced labor that American prisoners don’t receive, but this has been widely contested in a legal interpretation of the 13th Amendment.
The Urban Justice Centers Corrections Accountability Project in 2019 noted that at least 72 percent of all immigrant detainees were held in private institutions, and the projected trend is rising. Immigration populations have also skyrocketed since 1994, marking a 700%increase.
A law passed by Congress in 2010 requiring ICE to maintain “not less than 33,400 detention beds” giving ICE every financial incentive to fill those beds, maximizing the drive for over-incarceration. An estimate shows that between 2008 and 2016, CoreCivic earned over $680 million in ICE contracts, and the GEO Group earned $1.18 billion. In 2019, almost 30% of their revenue came from detaining immigrants.
This increase is also paralleled by GEO Group and CoreCivic pouring in an estimated 25 million dollars yearly into anti-immigrant candidate campaigns through a conservative legislative group named the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC has been campaigning to invest more funding into private prison companies and pass stricter immigration policies, contributing to extended detention periods.
The problem is the inherent greed and drive to exploit people in a privatized detention center to maximize profits. Due to GEO Group and CoreCivic’s control within the judicial and legislative system, they can lobby for increased detained immigrants to optimize profit margins.
Many lawsuits have been presented, but due to the lack of physical evidence of the wrongdoing within the centers, judges have always sided with the private prison companies. Due to the subjective interpretation of legal precedents, it’s essential to pass firm legislation addressing the massive underlying issues within privatized prisons to stop the exploitation and legalized enslavement of the most vulnerable communities.
Senator Merkley (D-OR) had proposed an amendment taking out the exception in the 13th Amendment, removing the incentives for mass incarceration and detainment of people. However, this amendment was short-lived, and many conservative representatives and senators backed by ALEC quickly killed the bill.
Without any actual change to the 13th Amendment clause, it’s essential to be mindful of which candidates are pushing for detention centers because, more likely than not, there is a powerful lobbyist agenda fueling the profit margins of privatized prison companies, like GEO Group and Core Civics.
With this information, there is a fundamental ethical concern about the character of America and the immigration policies we endorse. The reality of the crisis on the southern border is more complicated than the xenophobic jargon spewed by candidates and needs to be treated as such.