A report detailing abuses that illegal immigrants suffered while in federal custody has prompted advocates to renew their calls for President Joe Biden to follow through on his promise to end privately operated United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
Immigration lawyers and civil rights groups are furious with the Biden administration following the release of an NPR report this week that exposed horrific medical, mental, and physical experiences that immigrants endured while under federal watch.
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"They uncovered through FOIA damning evidence of the severe medical neglect that occurs in ICE detention centers, most of which are run by private prisons or are contracted-out county jails," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director for the American Immigration Council in Washington, in a statement on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
ICE has more than 200 detention centers and contracts with local jails to house immigrants. As of mid-August, more than 115 facilities housed a total of 29,731 people, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse out of Syracuse University in New York.
As of July, more than 90% of detainees were in a privately run facility, an increase from 80% during the Trump administration, according to Reuters.
Detention numbers have crept up since 2021, as have profits for one leading contractor, the GEO Group, who made more than $1 billion in 2022, according to its financial disclosures.
Experts hired by the government during the Trump administration to internally audit dozens of ICE detention centers and contracted local jails documented egregious conditions during their tour across 16 states.
In one case, a man at an ICE facility in Michigan was returned to the jail's open population space after having surgery despite surgical drains still in his body and an open wound.
Just as frustrating to the immigrant advocacy community has been Biden's lack of follow-through on a promise he made as a presidential candidate to do away with for-profit companies operating ICE's detention centers if elected.
"No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence," Biden said on the campaign trail in 2020.
Although Biden took office and quickly issued an executive order to stop handing companies contracts to run the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons, he did not do so for immigration jails, where noncitizens illegally in the United States may be held as they go through removal proceedings in court. Immigration offenses are not criminal and go before an administrative judge.
The National Immigration Project, a membership organization of attorneys and advocates, gave Biden a yellow score on his promise to end partnerships with for-profit companies, short of the green but not totally in the red.
“The Biden administration took some early steps to end certain [intergovernmental service agreements] or decrease the use of facilities with IGSAs, but those efforts have not continued as they should,” the National Immigration Project wrote in a May report assessing Biden’s promises on immigration. ISGAs are agreements between ICE and a local or state jail to hold immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to the Washington Examiner that it had closed the C. Carlos Carreiro Immigration Detention Center at a county jail in Bristol County, Massachusetts, and the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, run by LaSalle Corrections.
Earlier this year, ICE announced plans to close the Etowah Detention Center in Gadsen, Alabama; and scale back the use of the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida; the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisianan; and the Alamance County Detention Facility in Graham, North Carolina. Winn is run by LaSalle Corrections, while the others were local jails operated by sheriff's departments.
Some organizations, including the National Immigrant Justice Center, called for the Biden administration to go further than only ending for-profit detention centers and said he should “end detention now" in a statement on Aug. 16.
Detention Watch Network’s executive director, Silky Shah, said the NPR report was “exposing Biden’s hypocrisy on the issue.
“More evidence for why ending detention is the only answer,” Shah wrote on X.
A DHS official defended the government's decision to detain people and said that ICE prioritizes arresting individuals who have aggravated criminal convictions and that keeping facilities open was beneficial to immigrants in detention.
"ICE uses its limited detention resources to detain noncitizens who are considered a public safety or national security threat as they await their immigration proceedings and/or to carry out final orders of removal from the United States," the DHS official said. "In some cases, the closure of a facility today would require individuals to be detained at a greater distance, from their attorneys of record, family, friends, and community support, who would be obligated to travel greater distances to visit individuals in ICE custody."
Not only has the Biden administration fallen short of a campaign promise, but it is moving forward on building a massive new headquarters for ICE at the Department of Homeland Security's national headquarters in Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the 2024 groundbreaking of the new ICE facility as part of $288 million in projects to improve the department's campus.
Ron Vitiello, former President Donald Trump's nominee to oversee ICE during the period that the detention abuses occurred, said the reports presented "reason to be concerned" but that doing away with detention was not the solution.
"ICE has all the tools to do effective oversight of detention providers, but obviously there are lapses in these locations," Vitiello wrote in an email. "If we are to enforce the law, secure the border, and have an immigration system that has integrity, detention centers are required."
Alexandra Wilkes, spokeswoman for Day 1 Alliance, a trade association for government contractors in criminal justice and immigration, including GEO Group and CoreCivic, said the detention report's court-ordered release from a lawsuit filed during the Trump administration was political.
"It's obvious that some are trying to use these outdated reports to advance their long-standing efforts to attack ICE’s contractors and abolish the agency by proxy, since some 90% of its facilities are operated by federal contractors," Wilkes said in a statement. "Meanwhile, Day 1 Alliance members remain focused on providing real solutions that meet the stated needs of government, as we have reliably over the past four decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations."
A GEO Group spokesperson said the internal reports were part of a broader attempt by some to demonize ICE.
“We strongly reject these baseless allegations, which we believe are part of a longstanding radical campaign to attack ICE’s contractors, abolish ICE, and end federal immigration detention by proxy," the GEO Group spokesperson said in a statement. "We also note that certain detainees take actions that are instigated and coordinated by outside immigration advocacy groups, which are simply trying to further their anti-ICE political agendas.”
A DHS spokesperson said ICE "continuously reviews and enhances civil detention operations to ensure noncitizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled.”
Vitiello said the Biden administration's changes to border policy and public statements to suspend all deportations temporarily and only prioritize arresting the worst criminal illegal immigrants has undermined the agency's effectiveness.
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"[The Biden administration] doubled down on the nonsense, telling the world that ICE would no longer seek out those in the country illegally. Additionally, high levels of releases led to more illegal traffic," Vitiello said. "It is obvious that this administration is not taking recommendations from the front line. Those agents are forced to pick up the pieces of the POTUS disregard of the law."
DHS and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.