Just seven days after President Joe Biden’s administration, his immigration agenda has hit several obstacles. His 100-day break in deportations was blocked by a federal judge appointed by Trump, and Republicans are promising to slow down his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security over objections to his immigration record.
That is why immigration advocates were shocked on Tuesday to see Biden miss the opportunity to enact a long-promised reform for the detention of immigrants, without risk of such interference.
“It is unacceptable for the Biden-Harris administration to exclude immigrant arrests from today’s executive order,” said Laura Rivera, immigration attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund and director of the SPLC Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, on Tuesday. fair, after Biden signed an executive order putting an end to the use of private prisons by the Department of Justice, but leaving those operated by the Department of Homeland Security unharmed.
“The very concept of detaining immigrants is rotten in essence,” continued Rivera. “This is an irredeemable, profit-driven scheme that the Biden-Harris government must face.”
Biden largely fulfilled his ambitious “First Day” immigration agenda: revealing the United States Citizenship Act of 2021, which would amount to the most comprehensive reform of the immigration system in a generation; signing executive orders on his first day in office ending President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, fortified protections for DREAMers, halting the construction of the border wall and suspending deportations for 100 days.
But as initiatives to implement their immigration agenda fell short of their hopes – or fell victim to a federal judiciary largely shaped by Trump’s image – defenders told The Daily Beast, they are pressing Biden to use more powers to your disposition. Across the spectrum of immigrant rights groups and advocates in the hours after Biden signed an executive order eliminating the use of private prisons by the Department of Justice – no parallel order for private prisons administered as immigration detention centers by the Department of Homeland Security and lower level contractors.
“There is no talk about what may or may not happen with the ICE facilities,” Susan Rice, director of the US Domestic Policy Council, told reporters on Tuesday. “The Obama-Biden administration has taken steps to end the renewal of contracts for private prisons, the Trump administration has reversed that and we are restoring that.”
For organizations that fought on behalf of people detained in private detention centers, where they say that the incentive to minimize costs comes at the price of human dignity and security, the lack of an apparent plan for the entire prison system is unscrupulous.
“Whether they are called ‘prison’, ‘prison’ or ‘detention center’, these systems share the same unfair project: to imprison people of color, to profit from them and to deprive them of their dignity,” said Silky Shah, executive director from the Detention Watch Network. “The Biden administration must now address the toxic relationship between the private prison industry and the Department of Homeland Security.”
Proponents of immigration reform point to the relatively minimal impact that Biden’s executive order will have on the broader criminal justice system, compared to what a similar order could have on the detention of immigrants. In 2017, only 15 percent of prisoners in federal custody were held in private prisons, according to the Sentencing Project, compared with nearly 80 percent of those detained in immigration detention facilities.
Many private detention centers are operated under the supervision of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, or are employed by the Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Department (ICE) to a state or local entity that, in turn, subcontracts prison operators. private. In effect, this means that as the court ends up removing prisoners from private prisons, DHS detainees will remain behind, sometimes kept in exactly the same facilities from which American prisoners are being removed for humanitarian reasons.
Private prisons – which have become a billion-dollar industry as the Trump administration broadly expanded the immigration detention system – have received strong criticism from human rights defenders, who point to dehumanizing conditions at many of the facilities, especially those targeted at undocumented immigrants.
“These private prison companies have the incentive to minimize their costs without taking human suffering into account,” said Naureen Shah, senior activist and political advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, “and the ICE can only point the finger back at the private prison. company saying well it’s not us, it’s them. That’s disgusting. “
But the most profound illness of ICE detention, defenders told The Daily Beast, is the fact that these people are arrested in the first place, no matter who is directing it.
“If we want to eradicate cash-based incentives that lead to higher rates of incarceration, we must address their presence in all prisons and jails,” said Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice. “Many federal immigration detention centers continue to be run by private companies. The federal government is also responsible for creating perverse incentives for local governments, issuing contracts for local chains to keep people locked up for the ICE and the US Marshals. Even the US Department of Agriculture finances the construction of rural prisons. “
Asked before a public statement on Tuesday announcing executive orders on whether the executive order covered undocumented immigrants, he originally had no idea, before telling The Daily Beast that the scope of the plan was limited to the Department of Justice, with no plans to a parallel order on immigration en route to the announcement. The White House has since indicated that it is considering signing a similar executive order for the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Politico.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised that he would “make it clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants” if he were elected. This promise, as well as others, including a “Day One” agenda that included eliminating the “stay in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, sending legislation to Congress that would create a citizenship roadmap for undocumented immigrants and create a task force to bring migrant children separated from their families under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy – intended to contain skepticism about the Obama-Biden administration’s history of arrests and deportations, which eclipsed even Trump’s in its efficiency.
For ACLU’s Naureen Shah, setbacks are proof that Biden needs to be more aggressive – not more conciliatory.
“We want them to be bold,” said Shah. “Immigration battles will certainly be fought in the courts, but also in the offices of sheriffs, city councils, city councils and state legislatures, and the impact of the Biden government in these debates is enormous. The more daring it is at the national level, the more they will empower state and local authorities to get out of the immigration enforcement business. “
“This is the power that only they have,” Shah continued, “and we want them to use it.”