What is immigration detention?
Immigration detention is the profit-driven practice of incarcerating people while they wait for a decision on their immigration status or future deportation. Detention is managed by the federal government, with support from states and localities. Rooted in xenophobia and systemic racism, detention functions as an expansion of the unjust prison industrial complex, and overlap with the criminal injustice system is common. While most countries have some form of immigration incarceration, the United States has the largest and oldest immigration detention system in the world.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the main federal agency responsible for detaining immigrants. ICE manages a sprawling network of private prisons, county jails, and federal detention centers. This system operates largely in secrecy and is rife with human rights abuses. Detention is key to facilitating ICE’s deportation operations, and ICE imposes brutal conditions in detention as a way to force people to give up on their immigration case and leave the country.
Although the U.S. prison and immigration systems are interconnected, immigration detention is technically an administrative, or civil, form of confinement. While immigration detention may in some cases be triggered by prior criminal charges, people can be held for months, years, or indefinitely even though they are not actually serving a sentence. Despite this distinction, people are held in prisons and in prison-like conditions.
In practice, this means people in immigration detention have even fewer of the safeguards built into the criminal legal system, which can result in:
Lack of access to the outside world, such as no free phone calls
Inability to challenge detention through the courts and lack of access to a government-appointed attorney
No limitation on the length of detention
History of abuse and resistance
Since 1983, private prison corporations have sold immigration detention as the only viable state response to migration worldwide. Today, roughly 90% of all people detained by ICE are held in a privately-operated detention facility.
Since its inception, immigration detention has been notorious for its horrific conditions, including rampant racism, physical violence, fatal medical neglect, premature deaths, sexual assault, torture, and other harms. Often placed in remote areas, ICE detention centers operate as black box sites and Constitution-free zones. Rights are routinely deprived from individuals in ICE custody, and it’s difficult for family members, legal representation, and the press to visit detention sites. Their remote and secretive nature impedes oversight and facilitates a culture of corruption, impunity, and abuse among ICE and detention officials. Human rights violations have led to more than 200 reported deaths in U.S. immigration detention since 2003, when the government began tracking deaths in detention, with reports by experts finding the vast majority of these deaths preventable.
However, for decades, immigrants in detention have courageously stepped forward to expose mistreatment and advocate for their freedom. Year by year, the movement to abolish immigration detention has grown stronger. Momentum to end detention has led to statewide legislation banning or limiting state governments’ complicity in detention, along with community-led campaigns resulting in the closures of dozens of detention sites.
Immigration detention, whether privately or publicly managed, is dehumanizing by design. To end detention, we must not only challenge the immoral prison industrial complex, but confront the underlying and ongoing legacy of racism in the U.S. that sustains this system.
How the U.S. began to detain immigrants
The first known immigration detention facility in the world was Ellis Island in the New York Bay, which opened on January 2, 1892.
After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, the main function of Ellis Island changed from that of an immigration processing station to a detention facility for those entering the United States without documentation or who had violated the terms of admittance. Off the coast of San Francisco, the Angel Island Immigration Station opened in 1910 and was established as a site to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Similar to immigration laws today, the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted partly as a result of economic woes that politicians exploited to scapegoat and further xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. Like many immigrant prisons and jails operating across the world today, Angel Island and Ellis Island were isolated and people were detained indefinitely. The Immigration & Nationality Act of 1952 temporarily ended the practice of mass immigration detention in the U.S.
The expansion of U.S. immigration detention
The existence of the modern U.S. immigration detention system is relatively new. Like previous periods of mass detention, its expansion was largely driven by racism and xenophobic sentiment toward non-white immigrants. Disparately poor and racist treatment of Black immigrants in detention is a recurring pattern of the last several decades.
In the early 1980s, between 30 to 3,000 people were held in detention on any given day. But in that same decade, two corporations, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now called CoreCivic, successfully lobbied the government to expand detention and other forms of incarceration. The first federal contracts that GEO Group and CoreCivic won were for new immigrant prisons, one in Texas and another in Colorado.
Watch this video below featuring Freedom for Immigrants to learn more about the expansion of immigrant detention and what drives it: profit.
The modern detention system is born in the 1980s
In 1981, President Reagan launched a new migrant detention strategy, including revoking the right of asylum seekers to seek release through bond. His policy targeted migrants from Latin America, but particularly Haitian asylum seekers who were fleeing a dictatorship. Thousands of people were detained, typically in federal prisons in Florida, Puerto Rico, and other sites, with Haitians being held for the longest periods of time. At the same time, Reagan escalated the War on Drugs, helping militarize the southern border and blur the lines between drug enforcement and immigration enforcement.
Private prison companies saw an opportunity to grow their business and lobbied the government to expand immigrant detention. In 1983, CoreCivic won its first federal contract for an immigration detention facility in Texas — even holding people in one of its hotels while construction finished. In 1984, GEO Group (originally Wackenhut Corrections) was founded by former FBI agent George Wackenhut. The company is rooted in right-wing politics, known for compiling lists of suspected communists and collaborating with death squads in Central America.
Photo: Freedom for Immigrants volunteers gather outside of the Adelanto Detention Facility in solidarity with people in detention on World Refugee Day. This facility in California is operated by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the world. About 90% of all people in U.S. immigration detention are held in private prisons.
In the 1990s, President Clinton supercharged the detention and deportation machine
From 1991-1995, the U.S. detained tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans in inhumane conditions at Guantánamo Bay, with Haitians subject to greater cruelty and inhumane treatment during their confinement.
Early in his presidency, Clinton adopted “prevention through deterrence” — a strategy designed to block people from migrating and seeking refuge. Then, in 1996, Clinton passed two laws that radically changed our immigration system for the worse. These laws deeply entangled the immigration system with the already unjust and racist mass incarceration and sentencing system:
IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act)
AEDPA (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act)
These laws expanded the list of deportable offenses, now including non-violent drug charges, and removed judicial discretion. The bills allowed the government to:
Detain and deport people based on prior arrests or convictions, disproportionately impacting Black and brown people;
Indefinitely detain about half of the people in immigration detention by taking away discretion from judges to grant release on bond;
Deport lawful permanent residents (i.e. green card holders);
Require survivors of persecution abroad to be detained, sometimes indefinitely, immediately upon asking for asylum at a border;
Apply laws retroactively and ban return after deportation
These laws are still in effect today, fueling detention and deportation at mass scale. Tens of thousands of people are detained in abusive detention centers on any given day, where they are unable to access a court-appointed attorney, a free phone call, or a speedy trial.
How private prison companies profit off of immigrants
Private prison corporations — driven by their endless pursuit of maximizing profit — operate with the perverse incentive to detain as many people as possible, for as long as possible. This is not a system rooted in justice or fairness.
The United States government contracts with both private prison corporations and public jails to imprison people in immigration detention. In fact, this is the case in many countries. Research to date on private prisons has found that they are neither cheaper nor do they commit fewer abuses than publicly-operated immigrant jails.
When referring to immigrant prisons and jails, the labels “private” and “public” are deceiving because both kinds of facilities profit from imprisoning immigrants by running their operations well below the cost they are paid from taxpayers. In addition to the private prison corporations and the municipalities that profit from detention, a plethora of other companies exist to poorly and expensively construct and manage detention centers, run medical clinics, provide food, run commissaries, and manage telephone systems.
Learn about the history, laws and unjust realities of the U.S. immigration detention system in this short 5-minute Freedom for Immigrants explainer.
The global influence of the U.S. immigration detention system
The United States’ immigration detention system has influenced the infrastructure of detention systems in other countries, including those in Europe and Latin America.
After European member states signed the Schengen agreement in 1990, private prison companies began lobbying member states to harden the external borders of the European Union by detaining immigrants.
In the United Kingdom, the first European country to have outsourced detention to private companies, a U.S. citizen died at a GEO-run immigration detention facility in 2011; a jury found that his death was in part due to medical neglect at the Harmondsworth Removal Centre. Australia’s first private prison was operated by Corrections Corporation of Australia, an international venture of the U.S.-based CoreCivic. South Africa’s and New Zealand’s first private prisons were operated by GEO Group.
Despite thousands of lawsuits against private prisons worldwide — ranging from sexual battery to medical neglect to wrongful death — private immigration detention continues to expand.
The “success” of these publicly-traded, U.S.-based multi-national prison corporations have inspired the founding of others, such as Management & Training Corporation (MTC), G4S, Mitie, Serco, Tascor, GEPSA, Emerald Correctional Management, and Community Education Centers.