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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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Despite Promises of Reform, Private Prison Companies Still Thriving Under Biden: ACLU
"Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system."
Aug 07, 2023
The ACLU on Monday said that more than 90% of people held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July were locked up in for-profit facilities, despite promises and an executive order from President Joe Biden to phase out federal private prison contracts for immigrant detention.
"Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system," ACLU National Prison Project senior staff attorney Eunice Cho wrote in an analysis.
"The federal government's immigration detention system overwhelmingly relies on private prison corporations," Cho added. "Private prison corporations, like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have pocketed billions from ICE detention contracts in the past two decades."
While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden declared that "the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants." Just days into his presidency in January 2021, he signed an executive order "on reforming our incarceration system to eliminate the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities," a move cheered by progressives.
While the order applied to around 14,000 federal inmates incarcerated in private prisons at the time—or about 9% of the federal prison population and 0.6% of the approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—it did not apply to ICE.
"Since then, the number of immigrants detained by ICE—and revenues for private prison companies—have only increased," Cho noted.
According to her report:
As of July 2023, ICE detains on average 30,003 people each day. This is a significant increase from the start of the Biden administration in January 2021, when ICE held an average of 15,444 people in detention each day.
Under the Trump administration, 81% of people detained each day in January 2020 were held in facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations.
In the first two years of the Biden administration, this number remained relatively unchanged. In September 2021, 79% of people detained each day in ICE custody were held in private detention facilities.
In the last two years, however, this number has markedly increased: as of July 2023, 90.8%of people detained in ICE custody each day are held in detention facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations.
In 2022, GeoGroup raked in over $1 billion from ICE detention contracts, just under 44% of the company's total annual revenue. Competitor CoreCivic made more than $552 million from ICE contracts last year, amounting to 30% of the firm's yearly earnings.
"Despite calls from advocates to decrease funding for ICE detention, Congress appropriated $2.9 billion dollars to hold 34,000 people in ICE detention each day for [fiscal year] 2023," Cho noted.
The Biden administration has "also kept open detention facilities that its own oversight agencies have recommended for closure in light of abusive conditions and safety risks," Cho added, citing multiple migrant deaths at privately operated ICE lockups in New Mexico and Louisiana, as well as sexual abuse of detainees at a county jail in Florida.
A bipartisan U.S. Senate probe last year corroborated numerous allegations of abuse of jailed migrants by staff at detention facilities owned by LaSalle, a company that claims to be "run with family values."
Last week, a pair of advocacy groups published a report detailing widespread human rights abuses of migrants and some U.S. citizens allegedly perpetrated by Department of Homeland Security personnel at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
"The Biden administration can reverse course on immigration detention," Cho asserted. "It should dramatically reduce the number of people in ICE detention, invest in alternatives to detention, and stop allowing private prison companies from profiting by the billions of dollars each year off the suffering of immigrants in detention."
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