What did Biden promise?

As a presidential candidate in 2020, Biden pledged to end contracts with federal contractors that were for-profit businesses, raking in $500 million to $1 billion annually, as of 2022.

“No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence,” Biden promised.

Attorneys with the Washington-based American Immigration Council said in an analysis at the time that Biden’s plan called for ending contracts with private detention facilities.

Days after taking office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order that instructed the attorney general not to renew Department of Justice contracts with private criminal detention facilities — those related to the Bureau of Prisons, not immigration enforcement.

That executive order had no bearing on immigration detention facilities, which are run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The White House also debuted in 2021 an immigration bill that would expand ways to track immigrants in the country without detaining them, known as Alternatives to Detention.

In May, 10 Democratic and independent senators wrote to the DHS and asked the government to phase out privately run detention facilities, amping up the pressure on the Democratic White House.

“Today, ICE detains between 36,000 and 40,000 individuals, 91 percent of whom are held in private detention facilities,” the senators wrote in the letter.

The Detention Watch Network, part of the International Detention Coalition, a group that advocates against the jailing of people for immigration offenses, pointed to several government contractors as being the most relied-upon for detaining immigrants.

“The best-known companies are The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) and CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)), although there are a handful of other smaller companies as well,” the Detention Watch Network states on its website. “Together they administer — and profit from — 79 percent of detention beds. This is a significant expansion since 2009 when they operated 49 percent of detention beds.”

Immigration lawyers and civil rights groups are furious with the Biden administration following the release of an NPR report in mid-2023 that exposed horrific medical, mental, and physical experiences that immigrants endured while under federal watch.

This Biden campaign promise is one that few Democrats talk about now as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to succeed Biden, who is possibly silent on the issue given the current administration’s failure to keep its promise. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would end contracts with private immigration detention facilities as president.

Did Biden fulfill his promise?

Information provided by ICE revealed that when Biden took office, ICE housed illegal immigrants in 202 facilities nationwide.

As of March 31, 2024, ICE was housing immigrants in 139 facilities across the country.

However, ICE did not respond to multiple requests for a breakdown of how many or which for-profit facilities it had closed in that time.

A Government Accountability Office report found that ICE operated 14 detention facilities through for-profit contractors, facilities owned and operated by private companies as of fiscal 2020, which ended Oct. 31, 2020. The Biden-Harris administration took office in January 2021.

The 14 for-profit facilities were just a portion of the 202 facilities where ICE housed immigrant detainees nationwide, including facilities owned and operated by a state or local government, the U.S. Marshals Service, or ICE itself.

A look at publicly available ICE data showed that 13 privately run facilities, “contract detention facility” centers, continued to be in operation.

Those facilities included the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Colorado, the Desert View Annex in California, the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey, the Golden State Annex in California, the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Texas, the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in California, the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility in California, the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Texas, the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California, the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Texas, and the Tacoma ICE Processing Center in Washington.

Roughly 90% of immigrants detained by ICE were in private-run facilities, meaning that the for-profit facilities were far larger in size than local jails that ICE may have agreements with to house a few people, according to an analysis last year by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU did not respond to a request for comment.

As of last month, all facilities housed roughly 36,000 people, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data center out of Syracuse University in New York.

Alexandra Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the Day 1 Alliance, a trade association representing private-sector contractors for ICE, said Democrats and Republicans had relied on outside companies for four decades because the government was not able to on its own.

“Not having privately contracted detention facilities would leave a major hole in our immigration system. Those who enter the country illegally would likely be housed in overcrowded jails or released directly into communities even more than they are now,” Wilkes wrote in an email. “We need detention capacity so we can have a properly functioning immigration system that doesn’t overwhelm our communities and instead ensures that every immigrant receives humane care and legal due process.”

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Wilkes added that its facilities include space for healthcare services, recreational space, and online courtrooms.

The White House and Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.