The Business of “La Migra’s” Detention Centers

Behind the drama of the immigration detention centers lurks a lucrative business funded with taxpayer’s money out of the public eye. These are transactions that make a profit out of locking up minors, mothers and families, with little regard for the human impact or the threat to society that these actions represent.

An estimated $2 billion are spent every year in maintaining facilities to detain undocumented people. Most of this money – 62% – is directed toward the growing private prison complex and private detention centers. Turning locking people up into a for-profit endeavor has perverted the system by adding incentives to detain more people, as found by a recent report by the Detention Watch Network (DWN) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) entitled “Banking on Detention.”

In 2009, Congress began requiring detention centers to have at least 34,000 occupied beds at all times. That means that the government pays private companies to guarantee a minimal number of beds, whether they are occupied or not. This motivates the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to fill up the spaces they are getting paid for in the name of efficiency.

As if that was not enough, incentives go as far as awarding discounts for surpassing the number of filled beds. The more detained immigrants a center has, the better the price.

Little is known about the details of these agreements because ICE refuses to reveal them. The federal agency’s argument is justified by its relationship with the private sector, who say that they need to keep their government contracts secret. The DWN/CCR report cites the case of ex-ICE agent David Venturella, who is now Executive Vice President for Corporate Development for The GEO Group, one of the largest private correctional services providers in the country.

Ideally, the private sector would be removed altogether from a sector that should be managed by the government so that immigrants are not used to make money. Their suffering should not be used to fill other people’s pockets. For this, ICE’s actions need to be transparent and the agency needs to be reminded that it has to respond to the taxpayers who finance it, not contractors.