In 2011, Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos of El Salvador was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He was placed in the Theo Lacy Facility, operated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and then transferred to Adelanto Detention Facility, a private detention center operated by GEO Group. Both facilities had contracts with ICE. In 2015, Morales-Ramos died at Palmdale Regional Medical Center in California of organ failure with signs of widespread cancer. An ICE investigation into his death found that the medical care provided to him at the detention centers failed to meet the required federal standard of care. Morales-Ramos had symptoms of cancer starting in 2013, but the facilities failed to address the symptoms until a month before he died.

In 2017, a 31-year-old asylum seeker was detained at the United States-Mexico border and placed in a holding cell for twenty-four hours. She was four months pregnant. While in holding, she started to experience pain and heavy bleeding. She sought help, but her request went ignored by detention center staff. She was eventually transferred to Otay Mesa Detention Center, a private facility owned by CoreCivic in southern California. They transferred her to a hospital, where she miscarried. She was then returned to the detention center and was not provided any post-miscarriage care. Months later, she was still in pain from the miscarriage.

Unfortunate as these cases may be, they are not outliers. Many reports show that the living conditions inside detention centers do not meet the national detention standards required by ICE. Medical neglect, nutritional issues, and prolonged detention are among the top reported abuses in detention centers. There are over 20,000 people in immigration detention centers. Of these 20,000, 74.6 percent have no criminal records. Under the Trump Administration, immigration detention expanded; ICE increased the size of the immigration detention system by 50 percent and opened 40 new detention facilities.

Private immigration detention centers are a profitable business and President Biden’s prison reform policy amplifies the amount of contracting between private companies and ICE. Private Detention Centers are now a multimillion-dollar industry that continues to lack government oversight. To understand how the business came to be so lucrative and why it would be extremely difficult to dismantle, it is important to have context on the history of immigration in the United States. This includes looking at the country’s deeply rooted mistreatment of certain immigrant populations, as well as the federal government’s reactions to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how that event forever changed the landscape of U.S. immigration. It is equally important to know the history of the contracts between federal agencies and private companies and the present functions of these contracts.

In January 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to phase out the federal government’s contracts with private prisons. However, the executive order stops short of addressing the frequent practice of the government contracting with private companies to operate immigration detention centers. The order is specific to contracts with the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the United States Marshals Services (USMS). It does not address private immigration detention centers operated under ICE. President Biden may have put an end to privatized prisons; however, he missed an opportunity to abolish private detention centers. As it stands, the policy allows private companies to continue their contract with ICE. Facilities that have lost their prison contract with the Bureau of Prisons are in turn contracting with ICE to reopen prison facilities as detention centers. In a report to its shareholders, GEO Group Inc. indicated that it plans to market “to other federal and state agencies.” Immigration advocates were stunned that President Biden failed to address the private contracting of immigration detention. Many point out that the policy would have a greater impact on immigration detention compared to the effects it has on criminal justice reform.

This article will review immigration policies that have impacted the U.S. immigration system and the private detention center system. It will discuss President Biden’s executive order to phase out contracts with private prisons and why it failed to include the phase out of private detention centers. The article first looks at the history of the immigration system in the United States and the deeply rooted issues of medical abuse in immigration detention centers. It then examines the contracts between ICE and private companies and the lack of oversight of privatized detention centers. Lastly, the article discusses recommendations for how the United States should regulate detention centers.