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'Corruption in Plain Sight': AOC Warns Laken Riley Act a Boon to Private Prison Industry
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies," said Ocasio-Cortez.
Jan 22, 2025
"It's corruption in plain sight."
That's how U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described congressional colleagues who support Republican-authored legislation that immigrant rights advocates warn is a right-wing power grab under the guise of public safety.
The Laken Riley Act—named after a young woman murdered last year by a Venezuelan man who, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), entered the United States illegally—was passed by a vote of 263-156 in the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon. Forty-six Democrats and every Republican present voted "yes." That was a near-identical tally to the 264-159 vote on a previous version of the bill passed earlier this month.
Senate lawmakers passed the bill on Monday, with 12 Democrats joining 52 Republicans in voting for the measure, which, among other things, expands mandatory federal detention of undocumented immigrants who are accused of even relatively minor crimes. With the House's Wednesday vote, the Laken Riley Act is set to be the first bill signed into law since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Speaking on the House floor on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said:
I want the American people to know, with eyes wide open, what is inside this bill because we stand here just two days after President Trump gave unconditional pardons to violent criminals who attacked our nation's Capitol on January 6th, and these are the people who want you to believe, who want us to believe that they're trying to quote unquote "keep criminals off the streets," when they are opening the floodgates...
In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and... sent out for deportation without a day in court, without a moment to assert their right, and without a moment to assert the privilege of innocent until proven guilty without being found guilty of a crime they will be rounded up, that is what is inside this bill, a fundamental suspension of a core American value, and that is why I rise to oppose it.
"You may wonder why so many of our friends across the aisle who care so deeply about the rule of law happen to be so desperate to pass this bill," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "Look no further than the price tag of this bill, $83 billion. [Lawmakers] know that it can't be paid for. They know that the capacity is not there, and you know what will be there? Private prison companies are going to get flooded with money."
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies who receive this kind of money and look at the votes on this bill," she added. "It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful. It is absolutely shameful."
The congresswoman's comments came two days after Trump reversed a 2021 executive order issued by former Democratic President Joe Biden meant to phase out U.S. Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. Despite Biden's order, more than 90% of people held by ICE in July 2023 were locked up in for-profit facilities, which are rife with serious human rights abuses, according to the ACLU and other advocacy groups.
Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Hill opinion contributor, recently called the Laken Riley Act "a sweetheart deal for the private prison industry."
"Private prison executives look poised to pull off a multibillion-dollar cash grab at taxpayer expense via a cynical ploy to capitalize on the tragic death of a Georgia nursing student," he warned.
Shares in private prison stocks, which had been languishing for much of 2024, have soared since Trump's victory in November, with GeoGroup surging more than 127% since Election Day and competitor CoreCivic up over 63%.
Responding to reporting that ICE is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening 18 new facilities, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said on social media Wednesday: "That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies. They are salivating."
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H.R. 29 Is for Advancing Corporate Greed, Not Protecting Americans
This bill would strip judges of discretion and require immigrants to be detained and subject to deportation if they’re accused—not even convicted—of even minor offenses, benefiting private prison companies.
Jan 17, 2025
You’re reading the words of a formerly undocumented immigrant.
When I fled El Salvador four decades ago, I was 12 years old and alone. I wanted to escape the country’s civil war, where U.S.-backed death squads had made murders and rape our daily reality.
I reunited with my sisters, my only surviving family, in Wichita, Kansas. Once there, I helped open churches, started businesses, and raised three daughters. There were times I wasn’t sure we’d make it to the end of the month, but I was grateful for the sense of peace and security we were able to create here.
We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community.
That’s why I’m so alarmed that the new Republican-led Congress has chosen to open with a bill, H.R. 29, that strikes fear in the hearts of immigrant families all across the country. This bill would strip judges of discretion and require immigrants to be detained and subject to deportation if they’re accused—not even convicted—of even minor offenses like shoplifting.
This major assault on due process won’t keep anyone safer. It would terrorize all immigrants in this country, who studies show are much less likely to commit crimes of any kind than native-born Americans.
So who benefits from H.R. 29? Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, who made a fortune during the last Trump administration by running private prisons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
CoreCivic and GEO kept immigrants and asylum seekers in inhumane and toxic conditions with poor hygiene and exposed women and children to sexual predators. Under this new law, cynical executives will siphon off more public dollars, and wealthy investors will reap more rewards, from abusing and demonizing people seeking refuge from violence or poverty.
When President-elect Donald Trump won, private prison stocks soared. Why? Because investors anticipated making a fortune detaining immigrants. More than 90% of migrants detained by ICE end up in for-profit facilities.
GEO Group, which maxed out its campaign contributions to Trump, told its investors they could make almost $400 million per year supporting “future needs for ICE and the federal government” in a second Trump term. Their stock price nearly doubled in November.
Whether those detained are guilty or not, CoreCivic and GEO get paid. That’s what H.R. 29 is for: advancing corporate greed, not protecting Americans.
We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community. In addition to jailing immigrants, for-profit prison companies also look for ways to put citizens in prison more often—and for longer—so they can make more money.
Whenever we allow fundamental rights to be taken away, we erode our shared humanity and diminish all of our rights and freedoms.
The people behind H.R. 29 want us to be afraid of each other so we won’t stand together. They want to be able to barge into our homes, schools, and churches to take our neighbors and loved ones away. They want workers to be too scared to stand up to their bosses’ abuse. All so their donors in the private prison industry can make more money.
Democrats will need to find their way in this new Congress. Falling in line behind nativist fear-mongers who take millions in campaign contributions from the private-prison industry is not the right way to do it.
Americans demand better. We want true leadership with an affirmative vision for the future of this country and dignity for all people, including immigrants.
H.R. 29 targets whole communities because of the language we speak and the color of our skin. Instead, our elected leaders, regardless of party, must work to address people’s needs through building an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.
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Trump's Planned Immigrant Purge Sends Stagnant Private Prison Stocks Soaring
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment... and the opportunity that it will bring," said the firm's chair.
Nov 08, 2024
The chairperson of a leading U.S. private prison corporation on Thursday gushed over the "unprecedented opportunity" presented by the prospect of Republican President-elect Donald Trump delivering on his campaign promise to begin the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants on his first day in office.
As
Common Dreamsreported Thursday, Trump's campaign confirmed that "the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants" ever is set to start immediately after the former president returns to the White House on January 20.
GEO Group stock surged more than 56% from the close of trading on Tuesday, Election Day, to Friday's closing bell. Competitor CoreCivic shares skyrocketed 57% over the same period. By contrast, GEO Group stock saw just a 21% rise in the three months preceding Election Day. CoreCivic inched up just 11% over the same period.
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company's [and] country's history, and the opportunity that it will bring," GEO Group founder and chairperson George Zoley said during a Thursday earnings call call in which he hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" ahead, according to a company statement and coverage by HuffPost.
"While our third-quarter results were below our expectations due to lower-than-expected revenues in our electronic monitoring and supervision services segment, we believe we have several potential sources of upside to our current quarterly run rate, with possible future growth opportunities across our diversified services platform," Zoley continued.
"We have 18,000 available beds across contracted and idle secure services facilities, which if fully activated, would provide significant potential upside to our financial performance," he noted. "We also believe we have the necessary resources to materially scale up the service levels in our [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program] and air and ground transportation contracts."
Zoley added that "as we evaluate and pursue future growth opportunities, we remain focused on the disciplined allocation of capital to further reduce our debt, deleverage our balance sheet, and position our company to evaluate options to return capital to shareholders in the future."
According to a study published last month by the American Immigration Council, deporting the estimated 13.3 million people in the U.S. without authorization in one massive sweep would cost around $315 billion, while expelling 1 million undocumented immigrants per year would cost nearly $1 trillion cumulatively over a decade.
On Thursday, Trump insisted "there is no price tag" on his deportation plan. He dismissed concerns that such an operation would require the use of concentration camps like the mass detention centers—which one Trump official euphemistically compared with "summer camp"—of his first administration.
The private prison industry has also thrived during the Biden administration, which is on pace to match the 1.5 million people deported during Trump's previous presidency. Although President Joe Biden signed an executive order "on reforming our incarceration system to eliminate the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities" early during his tenure, the directive did not apply to detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
The number of immigrants detained by the Biden administration doubled between 2021 and 2023. In July 2023, more than 90% of immigrants detained by ICE each day were locked up in private facilities. In January 2020, the last month of Trump's first term, 81% of daily detainees were held in private lockups.
In 2022 a bipartisan U.S. Senate probe corroborated allegations of staff abuse against migrants jailed at facilities owned by LaSalle, a private prison company that
claims to be "run with family values." Whistleblowers and others have also revealed abuses from torture and medical neglect to sexual assault of children and forced sterilizations at privately run immigration detention centers.
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