By Betsey Piette
December 19, 2024
Within hours of Donald Trump’s electoral victory on Nov. 5, private prison stocks began to soar in anticipation of Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. By Nov. 18, stock values for GEO Group and Core Civic – private prison industry leaders – had more than doubled in the month since mid-October in anticipation that Trump’s aggressive deportation plan would increase detention center demand.
Demonstrators demand that Wall Street stop bankrolling private prisons, Manhattan, May 1, 2018.
Yet even before Trump takes office, the private immigration detention industry was already getting a multibillion-dollar head start from President Joe Biden to expand immigration jails, as revealed by a Guardian investigation, reported on Dec. 6.
While Biden had issued an executive order in January 2021 to phase out the federal criminal system’s use of for-profit prisons, his order left out the government’s reliance on for-profit immigration detention facilities, where some of the worst abuse and unsanitary conditions have been reported.
For fiscal year 2024, Congress approved $3.4 billion to detain 41,500 people per day – an increase from $2.9 billion in 2023. Under Biden, the number of people detained in jails under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rose from 14,195 in 2021 to nearly 39,000.
As of 2023, 90% of people in ICE custody were held in private facilities, where according to Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigration Justice Center, they “experience inhumane conditions and rights abuses that include medical neglect, preventable deaths, punitive use of solitary confinement, lack of due process and discriminatory and racist treatment.” (Guardian, Dec. 6)
Many of the complaints of abuse stemmed from ICE facilities in California owned and operated by GEO Group. Yet despite campaigns to shut them down, which included letters from U.S. senators, in October, Biden extended one GEO contract for five more years.
‘Deporter-in-chief’
But the crisis of for-profit immigration prisons goes back even to before Trump’s first term. President Barack Obama is credited with creating the harshest and largest immigration enforcement regime in U.S. history, deporting around 3 million undocumented workers.
The Obama administration also expanded detention for many of the 231,000 children asylum seekers since 2010. (CATO.org, Jan. 25, 2017) The National Council of La Raza called Obama “the deporter-in-chief.”
Whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in the White House does not change the profit-driven nature of U.S. capitalism which created the crisis of migration. For decades under globalization, the development of high technology allowed the establishment of factories and sweatshops throughout Central and Latin America, driving wages down and destroying local economies.
U.S. imperialism’s support for corrupt governments and the overthrow of progressive leaderships helped to create the crime syndicates that force many migrants to flee their home countries.
For decades, both capitalist parties have failed to put forward serious and permanent immigration reform that would expand legal migration and legalize the status of the current undocumented immigrant population. Expanding deportations and militarizing the borders are not the solution. Undocumented immigrants are not the problem.
The solution lies in the creation of a mass employment program that includes educational opportunities – but that hasn’t happened under any of the recent presidents.
Under Biden, 15 colleges closed in 2023 and at least 16 nonprofit colleges and universities announced closures this year. Most were low- tuition dependent colleges without the mammoth endowments of major Ivy League universities.
Over the next five years, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, college closures will significantly increase. The connection between the funding of prisons and the lack of funding for education cannot be denied.
In the coming fight against the next Trump administration, workers need to unite against attacks on our migrant/immigrant siblings and for the jobs and education that everyone needs.
