President Donald Trump’s signature budget legislation allocates Immigration and Customs Enforcement a staggering $45 billion to expand immigrant detention efforts. Much of this money will go toward tripling ICE’s for-profit detention facility network.
Even though these private facilities hold human beings in federal custody under federal law, they operate in secret and are not subject to the federal transparency law, the Freedom of Information Act.
This must change.
ICE is not the secret police, no matter how much it might like to be, and the agency should not be allowed to run de facto secret detention facilities.
A commonsense way to prevent this would be to make private prisons and immigration detention centers subject to FOIA.
The Private Prison Information Act
In 2023, Congressman Jamie Raskin and Sen. Ben Cardin tried to accomplish this goal by introducing the Private Prison Information Act. This good bill would have required federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests concerning the private prisons and detention facilities that incarcerate or detain people on behalf of the federal government.
Unfortunately, the 2023 bill didn’t go anywhere — again.
PPIA has been introduced regularly since 2005 but has been thwarted each time by intense lobbying from private prison companies, and private prisons have been able to shirk oversight for decades as a result.
This secrecy is unacceptable even under normal circumstances.
A Justice Department inspector general report found that private prisons are more dangerous than federal facilities, and their corporate protections make it impossible for the public, Congress, and even ICE to ensure these companies are fulfilling the terms of their extremely lucrative contracts.
These are not normal circumstances.
Thirteen migrants have died in ICE custody as of writing this, and the Trump administration’s “immigration blitz” makes it all the more urgent that the public has a mechanism to force transparency at these facilities.
Not only should the PPIA be reintroduced, it should be expanded to include for-profit detainee transport companies, which often fly under the radar of private prison reform efforts.
Private prisons make a killing off secrecy
ICE already relies on private detention centers to house nearly 80% of its detainees. With tens of billions of dollars now at its disposal, it intends to double its detention capacity to 100,000 beds nationwide.
This will be a boon for private companies.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, ICE has “awarded new or expanded contracts to at least nine facilities owned by the Geo Group or CoreCivic, the two largest detention contractors.” ICE also recently published a list of 41 companies to provide nontraditional detention spaces, including nine that will provide “soft-sided” facilities. In other words, tents.
The Justice Department findings that private prisons are more dangerous than federal ones are corroborated by recent reports that a Geo Group immigration detention facility lacked adequate water and food for the swell of detainees in its care, and that a CoreCivic facility was not allowing detainees to flush their toilets for days at a time.
At the same time that they are endangering lives, private detention companies and their investors are getting rich. Geo Group has “primed shareholders for a government contract bonanza that could boost annual revenue by more than 40 percent and profits by more than 60 percent.”
This ghoulish immigration industrial complex profiteering should not be allowed to take place in secret.
There has never been a more important time to force transparency at ICE and the for-profit companies it gives billions of dollars of taxpayer money to. Private prisons, detention facilities, and transport services must be subject to FOIA.
