The Laken Riley Act is a sweetheart deal for the private prison industry

Private prison executives look poised to pull off a multi-billion dollar cash grab at taxpayer expense via a cynical ploy to capitalize on the tragic death of a Georgia nursing student.

This week, the Senate took up debate on the Laken Riley Act, which would expand mandatory immigration detention, after it was passed by the House. Current law already grants officials sweeping authority to arrest anyone they suspect lacks legal immigration status and to imprison them thousands of miles away in isolated jails in remote parts of the country. The law also already makes detention mandatory for people who lack a legal right to admission to the U.S. and for people convicted of certain crimes, including minor theft offenses.

But the Laken Riley Act goes a step further by making immigration detention mandatory for people merely accused of theft offenses such as shoplifting — however minor those acts are considered in the jurisdiction where they occurred, however long ago they occurred and even without any evidence that they actually did occur. An adopted amendment to the bill adds additional grounds for mandatory detention based on accusations alone.

“Detention” is simply a sanitized term for prison. Many detention centers are actually repurposed criminal jails and prisons that emptied out as America’s crime rate dropped to historic lows. “Mandatory” detention requires immigration officials to lock up people without any suspicion that they are a danger to the community or a flight risk; without any right to a hearing before a judge to request release on bond or supervision; and without any time limit to the length of incarceration.

The only way out of mandatory immigration detention is accepting deportation or winning an immigration case — even though such cases can take years to wind their way through court. Right now, over 700 people have been held for longer than a year in immigration detention, with nearly 10 percent of them held longer than two years.

Good-faith supporters of the Laken Riley Act may believe that it’s common sense that more mandatory detention makes immigration enforcement more efficient. But 30 years of experience demonstrates the opposite.

Since mandatory immigration detention was first signed into law in 1996 for a subset of people in deportation proceedings, it has turned into a cash bonanza for the private prison industry. In 1995, the average daily detention population was 7,475. Today, over 39,000 people a day are held in immigration detention, with over 90 percent of them in private prisons and 62 percent of them in mandatory detention. In Fiscal Year 2024, Congress appropriated $3.43 billion to immigration detention centers alone, more than was allotted for programs to eliminate homelessness, create middle-class jobs in supply chain infrastructure or replace toxic lead pipes carrying drinking water.

Mandatory immigration detention hasn’t brought efficiency. Since 2006, as mandatory detention has exploded, a removal case for a detained person now takes a median of seven times as long. It hasn’t brought safety. Noncitizens have significantly lower crime rates than native-born citizens across criminal offenses, including violent, property, drug and traffic crimes. Over 60 percent of people in immigration detention have no criminal record at all, with traffic offenses being the most common conviction.

Mandatory detention hasn’t brought accuracy. A six-year snapshot of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows erroneous detention of nearly 1,500 American citizens, with some held for years. And it certainly hasn’t brought decency. As scores of lawsuits and investigations show, people in immigration detention endure serial abuse at the hands of officials, including forced labor, sexual abuse, torture and preventable deaths.

In fact, the only people who would benefit from the Laken Riley Act’s proposed expansion of mandatory detention are the private prison executives reaping a bonus this year, many of them former Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials now collecting corporate salaries funded by the contracts they arranged while working for the federal government. Stock prices for the two largest private detention contractors, GeoGroup and CoreCivic, are up 74 percent and 55 percent. The COO of CoreCivic recently crowed to shareholders about the historic “value proposition” from these government contracts. And on cue, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have asked for an additional $3.2 billion to pass along to their prison executive cronies if the Laken Riley Act passes.

Three decades of mandatory immigration detention have wasted enough taxpayer money and inflicted enough lasting damage on the rights of American citizens and immigrants alike. The Senate should reject this blatant corporate cash grab.

Anthony Enriquez is the vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

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