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Just seven days after President Joe Biden’s administration began, and his immigration program has already hit many obstacles. His 100-day break on deportations was blocked by a federal judge appointed by Trump, and Republicans are vowing to slow his candidate for head of the Department of Homeland Security amid objections to his immigration record.
That’s why immigration advocates were stunned on Tuesday to see Biden miss an opportunity to enact long-promised immigration detention reform without the risk of such interference.
“It is unacceptable that the Biden-Harris administration is excluding immigrant prisons from today’s executive order,” Laura Rivera, immigration lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center action fund, said Tuesday. and director of the SPLC’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, after Biden’s signing. a decree putting an end to the use of private prisons by the Ministry of Justice, but leaving unharmed those managed by the Ministry of Internal Security.
“The very concept of immigrant detention is rotten in its essence,” Rivera continued. “This is an irremediable, profit-driven racket that the Biden-Harris administration must grapple with.”
Biden has largely stuck to his ambitious “day one” agenda on immigration: the unveiling of the US Citizenship Act of 2021, which would amount to the most comprehensive reform of the immigration system in a generation; signing several decrees on his first day in office ending President Donald Trump’s ban on Muslims, strengthened protections for DREAMers, halting construction of the border wall and suspending evictions for 100 days.
But while moves to implement his immigration agenda have fallen short of their hopes – or have fallen victim to a federal justice system largely modeled after Trump’s image – advocates told The Daily Beast , they pressure Biden to use more of the powers at his disposal. Across the specter of immigrant rights groups and immigrant rights advocates in the hours after Biden signed an executive order phasing out the Department of Justice’s use of private prisons – without parallel order for private prisons run as immigration detention centers by the Department of Homeland Security and lower level contractors.
“Nothing is said 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 action to end the renewal of contracts for private prisons, the Trump administration has reversed this and we are reinstating it.
For organizations that have fought on behalf of people held in private detention centers, where they say the incentive to minimize costs comes at the cost of human dignity and safety, the lack of a plan apparent for the entire prison system is unacceptable.
“Whether called ‘prison’, ‘prison’ or ‘detention center’, these systems share the same unfair conception: to incarcerate people of color, to take advantage of them and to strip them of their dignity,” said Silky Shah, executive director of the detention monitoring network. “The Biden administration must now grapple with the toxic relationship between the private prison industry and the Department of Homeland Security.
Supporters of immigration reform point out the relatively small impact Biden’s executive order will have on the broader criminal justice system compared to what a similar order could have on immigrant detention. In 2017, only 15% of inmates in federal custody were held in private jails, according to the Sentencing Project, compared to nearly 80% of those held in immigration custody at these facilities.
Many private detention centers are operated under the supervision of the justice and homeland security departments, or are contracted out by Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to a state or local entity that, in turn, subcontracts to private prison operators. Indeed, this means that as justice removes detainees from private prisons, DHS detainees will remain behind, sometimes held in the exact same facilities from which detainees US citizens are deported for humanitarian reasons.
Private prisons – which became a billion dollar industry when the Trump administration dramatically expanded the immigration detention system – have drawn strong criticism from human rights activists, who point to the dehumanizing conditions in many establishments, especially those for undocumented immigrants.
“These private prison companies are urged to minimize their costs with no regard for human suffering,” said Naureen Shah, senior advocacy and policy adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union, “and ICE just pointed out. finger private prisons. business, saying, well it’s not us, it’s them. It’s disgusting.
But the deepest illness of ICE detention, advocates told The Daily Beast, is the fact that these people are jailed in prison in the first place, no matter who runs it.
“If we are to eradicate the financial incentives that lead to higher incarceration rates, we must address its presence in all prisons and prisons,” 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 tasked with creating perverse incentives for local governments by issuing contracts for local jails to hold people in jail for ICE and US Marshals. Even the United States Department of Agriculture supports the construction of rural prisons. “
Asked ahead of a public briefing Tuesday announcing the decrees on whether the decree covered undocumented immigrants, originally had no idea, before telling the Daily Beast that the scope of the plan was limited to the Department of Justice, without no parallel order project on immigration being announced. Since then, the White House has indicated that it is considering signing a similar decree for the Department of Homeland Security, according to Politico.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden vowed that he would “make it clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including the detention of undocumented immigrants” if elected. That promise – along with others, including a “first day” program 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 the creation of a task force to reunite migrant children separated from their families as part of the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy – aimed to counter the skepticism of the Obama-Biden administration’s record on detentions and deportations, which even eclipsed Trump’s in its effectiveness.
For ACLU’s Naureen Shah, setbacks are proof that Biden needs to be more aggressive – not more conciliatory.
“We want them to be bold,” Shah said. “Battles over immigration are certainly going to be fought in the courts, but also in the sheriff’s offices, county councils, city councils and state legislatures, and the impact of the Biden administration on these debates is huge. The bolder it is at the national level, the more power they empower state and local authorities to withdraw from immigration control activities. “
“This is the power that only they have,” Shah continued, “and we want them to use it.”
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