PRAXIS.

Introduction

Immigration detention is a difficult thing to ignore in the current political landscape. The internet is constantly flooded with videos of violent arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, stories of legal citizens being kidnapped and arrested, and livestreams of protests, many of which end in violence. In addition to simply speaking out against immigrants and advocating for their deportation, President Donald Trump criminalizes them through dehumanizing language and advocates for their mass incarceration. The Prison-Industrial Complex (Eisen 68) has led to a vicious cycle of mass incarceration through a system of lobbying by billionaire private prison CEOs and propaganda by politicians. Privatization in Immigration detention as a result of the Prison-Industrial Complex, in addition to corrupting the system of immigration law entirely, has produced human rights violations, racism, and misuse of tax revenue. This has been exacerbated by the Trump administration, posing risks to legal U.S. Citizens and even threatening the Fourteenth Amendment in its entirety.

Origins of Private Prison

The use of private prisons in the incarceration of immigrants is not a new practice. To understand the privatization of prison, the rise of mass incarceration, and the mistreatment of immigrants, we have to look at the very origins of prison itself. The American prison system originated in Pennsylvania in the 1790s as a result of a Quaker philosophy on spiritual meditation to cure the “disease of the mind” that crime was deemed (Eisen 15). Though this quickly corrupted, and prisoners were bid out to private corporations as laborers throughout the 19th century, the 1900s brought better treatment for prisoners. By the 1950s, a philosophy of rehabilitation was the widely accepted theory of corrections, offering inmates both psychotherapy and group therapy (Eisen).

However, in 1960, there was a large pushback against rehabilitation as a result of publications by sociologist Robert Martinson claiming rehabilitation is ineffective. Though he later wrote papers rescinding this belief, the impression of his initial stance on rehabilitation was much more impactful. As a result of the new anti-rehabilitation sentiment and increased crime from Civil Rights protests, President Lyndon B. Johnson implemented a “War on Crime” in March 1965. He championed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which brought over $400 million in grants to law enforcement.

Following the foundation of anti-war sentiment, President Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971, which was followed by the Reagan Administration’s fight against crack-cocaine (Eisen) in 1982. However, crack-cocaine use didn’t emerge in inner cities until 1985–three years after Reagan announced his “War on Drugs” (Eisen 22), leading to questionable validity of the campaign as a whole. The “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s fight against crack-cocaine were notoriously skewed against minority communities, as drug laws in the United States have been for centuries. Instead of actually fighting against drugs, the “War on Drugs” was used as a tool to disrupt and subjugate minority communities that Nixon’s campaign saw as political enemies, especially black communities. This use of incarceration as a political ploy and a strategy to subjugate minorities continues today, as the United States continually uses punitive measures against drug use instead of treating it as a public health issue (Dholakia).

In the 1980s, with the privatization of prisons, a new type of correctional policy emerged: the new penology. Rather than focusing on individual crime, the new penology focused on large-scale corrections by assessing the risks of specific subpopulations in the name of efficiency. Despite its promise for more efficient law enforcement, this was immediately utilized as a way to target minority populations (Welch).

Regardless of the motives for the era of mass incarceration, the culture of fighting crime established by the aforementioned presidential administrations had become deeply rooted into American political thought and was seen as one of the most pressing issues in America. President H.W. Bush won his campaign by painting his opponent as less tough on crime than he was, even going so far as to place a drug dealer in D.C. to monger fear of the threat drug dealers posed. Following H.W. Bush in using crime as a political ploy to garner constituent approval, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, which authorized up to $8 billion in grants for prisons and boot camps, and the Appropriations Act of 1996, which amended the 1994 Crime Act to specify that these funds could be used for the privatization of prison.

The end of the 20th century was met with legislation that increased the amount of time criminals spent in prison, such as mandatory minimums, “three strikes you’re out” laws, and truth-in-sentencing laws. Mandatory minimums set minimum sentences for crimes, “three strikes you’re out” laws increased sentences for repeat felony offenders, and truth-in-sentencing laws required prisoners to serve the majority of their initial sentence before having the opportunity to be released early or be put on parole (Eisen). As a result of this rapid increase in incarceration, overcrowding in prisons became the standard throughout the 1980s and 1990s, prompting the adoption of private prisons by the U.S. government as a way to decrease pressure on public prisons (Luan). In just 35 years, the prison system had been transformed from a center for correction and rehabilitation to a weapon that victimized millions for political gain.

Emergence of Immigration Detention

Similarly to the emergence of mass incarceration as a ploy to subjugate black Americans, mass immigration detention has been used as a ploy to subjugate undocumented immigrants, especially minorities. While the practice of detaining undocumented immigrants while they are in removal proceedings dates back to 1882 with the creation of a federal immigration inspection system, it was distinctly different from the correctional nature of prisons: since immigration offenses violate civil law rather than criminal law, immigration detention was strictly for the purpose of ensuring undocumented immigrants didn’t escape before their trials. However, as immigration detention grew harsher throughout the 20th century due to foreign distrust, especially against Asian immigrants and suspected anarchists, the standards of immigration detention centers began to closely resemble those of criminal detention centers. Meanwhile, private prison corporations such as CoreCivic recognized an opportunity for profit from immigration detention as the number of daily detainees increased. The privatization of prison was quickly followed by the privatization of immigration detention, which quickly surpassed public immigration detention (Luan).

The system of immigration detention quickly, as it was also privatized, followed in the exploitative footsteps of the prison system. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) quickly abandoned its social service duties, such as assisting immigrants in their pursuit of naturalization, and ramped up its detention of immigrants. They conformed to the new penology starting in 1980 with the arrival of Cuban immigrants called Mariels. Though these immigrants were initially seen as survivors of communism, the INS intentionally created a stigma against them through a disinformation campaign. As Mariels were poor people of color, this was quickly extremely effective, and thousands of Cuban men were indefinitely detained (Welch).

Donald Trump & The Prison-Industrial Complex

The Prison-Industrial Complex takes a two-step approach to keep the private prison industry’s exploitative system in place: lobbying and propaganda. Prison corporations donate to political campaigns to help elect politicians that represent their best interests. In return, the politicians promise to help the corporations by increasing incarceration and its privatization. The money sent to these politicians is used to enact the propaganda that allows for such a system to take place. Though this system was a major catalyst for the privatization of prison in the late 20th century, Donald Trump has served as a perfect example of the political corruption that has allowed prison corporations to influence policies surrounding mass incarceration.

Following attempts by the Obama administration to deprivatize immigration detention and focus detention and deportation efforts on criminals, ultimately decreasing arrests, private prison corporations retaliated by increasing their financial political involvement. In the 2016 election, private prison corporations contributed nearly $1.8m through soft money, individual contributions, and PACs, more than doubling the roughly $800k in the 2012 election. Consequently, repaying his campaign funders, Trump took a harsh stance on immigration, reversing any plans that Obama made to decrease the mass detention of immigrants (Open Secrets). The practice of arresting immigrants proved to be very lucrative for private prison corporations: in fiscal year 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent an average of $126 daily for each detained noncitizen (Luan). As a result, campaign donations from private prison corporations have continued to increase, reaching $3.1m in 2020 and $4.2m in 2024, primarily being directed to republican and conservative parties (Open Secrets). Trump owes a significant portion of his 2024 election to the donations he received from private prison corporations. As a result, he repays the favor by enacting propaganda and policies that suit these companies’ best interests.

Scapegoating & Anti-Immigration Sentiment

In order to allow for the detention of immigrants on such a massive scale to maintain campaign funding from prison corporations, Trump has criminalized and dehumanized immigrants: "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within," Trump stated, imitating the fascist speech of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Additionally, he stated "[undocumented immigrants] are the worst criminals in the world… These people are the most violent people on Earth,” (Hubbard et al.). As a result of this language, Trump has successfully spread fear of undocumented immigrants among his voter base. This fear, as well as further imitating Hitler’s propaganda tactics by blaming immigrants for all of America’s social and economic problems (Godfrey-Grant), has allowed Trump to justify the widespread and aggressive detention of immigrants, appeasing his donors. In addition to just repaying the favor of his inauguration to prison corporations, the criminalization and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants has garnered a fiercely loyal group of supporters, all in favor of the deportation and detention that Trump’s campaign financially benefits from.

Trump has taken advantage of this anti-immigration sentiment to scapegoat immigrants for the issues that his policies contribute to. For example, instead of holding corporations responsible for low wages and outsourcing labor, immigrants are blamed for “stealing jobs”. Meanwhile, immigrants tend to work in sectors such as hospitality and construction, which Americans simply tend not to work in (Luminus). Meanwhile, Trump has imposed tariffs that were actually responsible for slowed job growth, decreasing the hours worked as much as the equivalent of over 350,000 full-time jobs (Durante and York). Additionally, Luminus draws a comparison between Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration, claiming that the system of providing hurdles to naturalization, attempting to gut birthright citizenship, and mass-incarcerating immigrants has the exact same goal of the system that imposed poll taxes, literacy tests, and mass incarceration on black Americans in the Jim Crow era: political suppression. These practices both aimed to suppress and scapegoat minorities to keep the power in the hands of the few (Luminus).

Human Rights Violations

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, he has taken an aggressive stance on immigration, issuing executive orders with overwhelming speed. In 2025 alone, he has enrolled the military in immigration and border policing; declared border security a national security emergency; attempted to end birthright citizenship; revoked prohibitions that prevent ICE officials from entering sensitive locations, such as schools, churches, and hospitals; set arrest quotas for all ICE agents; and much more (Hiemstra 152). Trump has also used expedited removal, a process by which lower level immigrant officers can remove undocumented immigrants from the country without a proper hearing before an immigration judge, to speed up the process of deportation in order to appeal to the fanbase he politicized. This has led to many erroneous arrests of those who legally reside in the United States, as well as providing much of the footage published online of illegal and violent kidnappings by ICE officers (American Immigration Council).

Trump has also heavily increased the number of immigration enforcement flights, further raising concerns of human rights violations as these flights nearly always shackle detainees with handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons for extended periods of time (Human Rights First). Finally, in a 6-3 vote in the case known as Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration an emergency request to continue to allow ICE agents to kidnap people off the streets and question them on their citizenship status based on how they look, what language they speak, and where they presumably work. While this is not a final ruling, it suggests that the Supreme Court will continue to uphold the ability for immigration raids to bend the law (American Immigration Council).

Beyond the injustice of mass incarceration itself, the treatment of both prisoners and immigrant detainees is abominable. Human rights violations within the immigration detention system occur disproportionately in privately owned detention centers: “companies not only placed excessive numbers of prisoners in isolation, but also overcrowded the prisons, reduced medical staff, and withheld medical treatment,” (Luan). Additionally, “Poor staffing, obstructed access to counsel and the courts, inhumane living conditions, inadequate medical care, and physical and sexual assault by staff are growing problems in INS detention,” (Welch 76).

Solutions

Though the iron triangle between private prisons and the U.S. government is very strong, immigration detention can be diminished through fighting against lobbying efforts by private prisons, aiding immigrant legal services in their jobs and ensuring that all immigrants receive the right to counsel, and reforming contracts between private prisons and the U.S. government.

Reforming Private Prison

There has already been progress against the private prison industry. For example, during Obama’s presidency, ICE reduced the number of contracts with private prisons, released new standards to strengthen the process for detainees filing complaints, and increased its investment in alternatives to detention (ATD), such as monitoring technology (Luan). Additionally, around the same time, the “Treatment Industrial Complex” (Eisen 216) emerged. In fear of bipartisan support of more corrections-based treatment of crime ruining their businesses, private prisons began to adopt addiction rehabilitation, mental health treatment, job training, and electronic monitoring in an attempt to diversify their corporations (Eisen). Although this is a positive change, it’s not enough to combat the harm that private prison corporations make. While it’s good to move towards rehabilitation and alternatives to detention, the goals of a for-profit private prison corporation are at odds with corrections, as these companies profit from the imprisonment and/or sickness of their detainees/patients (Isaacs).

As a result, unless we switch to public corrections facilities entirely, there needs to be a great amount of reform of private prison corporations. The only way to keep contracts with private prisons while having a prison system that actually benefits our country is to reform private prisons so that it’s lucrative to make positive change rather than to exploit detainees. First, Eisen advocates for evaluating prisons on recidivism rates, which is how likely prisoners are to return to prison after serving their first sentence (Merriam-Webster). This is a good way of evaluating a prison’s performance because it demonstrates that prisoners are rehabilitated in a way that discourages further crime. In 2013, Pennsylvania announced it would cut ties with private prison corporations and then create new contracts that assess them on the basis of performance. Facilities would be paid a 1% increase per client per day if their recidivism rates fell below a certain level. Since then, the recidivism rates for Pennsylvania’s private prison contracts have fallen 11% (Eisen 222).

This principle of incentivising private corporations to make positive change is continually advocated for by Eisen. She continues to advocate for Social Impact Bonds, which are public-private partnerships in which private corporations invest in and fund social programs that help address public interest issues. If the public policy outcome is achieved, these private investors are repaid and can even make a profit. This forces the private sector to bet on the success of prisoners rather than profiting from their failure. Though the nature of private companies profiting from this seems corrupt, money and time otherwise spent advocating for policy can be saved by implementing corrections privately (Eisen 223).

Additionally, Eisen claims that improving contracts with prisons is key to ensuring that they work towards public interests rather than private greed. She outlines a ten-step process to improve contracts that hinges primarily on transparency in prisons, the ability to cancel prison contracts, and incentivising positive effects. Maintaining transparency in prisons is key to preventing abuse and poor prison conditions. If prisons are regularly inspected and no part of the prison is off limits, private prisons are unable to host any undesirable conditions that the media won’t see. This goes hand in hand with the ability of the government to cancel prison contracts at any time: if the prison isn’t complying with human rights standards, the contract will immediately be terminated. Having regular prison check-ins as discussed with the transparency portion of this plan will ensure that no abuse happens behind closed doors.

Finally, incentivising positive effects is the backbone to Eisen’s entire argument throughout her work. Incentivizing positive effects, such as low recidivism rates, encourages prisons to make positive changes. Additionally, since the government has full power in making these contracts, there is no reason that they shouldn’t require prisons to provide vocational and educational classes for inmates, or even therapy and rehabilitation. Even outside of the fact that this aligns perfectly with the prison industry’s treatment industrial complex and the diversification of private prison corporations, this would in no way harm private prison companies as they would be compensated for any positive impacts they had on prisoners due to the nature of the contract between them and the U.S. government (Eisen).

Corrupt Lobbying

Another solution to the corruption in private prison and immigration detention is taking away corruption’s strongest tool: lobbying. While outlawing lobbying is impossible and would even harm the system of communication between constituents and representatives, the lobbying that private prisons use is very different from public interest lobbying: it’s only helpful to bridge the gap between the two forms of lobbying. What makes private lobbying so successful is the sheer amount of money that private corporations can donate to political campaigns. Although lobbyists are subject to the same contribution limits as other donors ($2700 per candidate per election), lobbyists can support politicians more by holding fundraising events or bundling contributions from other donors. 

Additionally, corporations can donate unlimited amounts of money to superPACs. This money is used for advertising for a specific politician, and can spread much more awareness about a politician than comparatively underfunded public lobbying. One way to fight against private lobbying is to ban members of Congress from accepting contributions from entities with interests directly involved with their congressional committee. This would directly decrease the amount of influence that private prisons have on congressional decisions regarding the justice system by standing in the way of their corrupt lobbying. Additionally, another way to fight against private lobbying is to directly ban lobbyists from fundraising for politicians. This would prevent private prison corporations, among other groups, from hiring lobbyists to fundraise directly for politicians, and therefore disrupt the iron triangle between private prisons and the U.S. government. Finally, ending secret spending in U.S. Elections would allow citizens to know where campaign funds are coming from, which would discourage politicians from accepting large sums of money from companies with corrupt interests due to the consequential association with said corruption as a result of the transaction (Sozan).

Reforming Immigration Law

Beyond the institutions of private prisons, it is important to look at the systems that allow corruption in immigration detention to take place. As a result of the anti-immigrant propaganda that criminalizes immigrants, deportation and immigration detention have been ramped up drastically. Particularly in the last year, president Donald Trump has attempted to degrade due process, expand detention, and speed up deportation. To combat this, it’s essential to protect the legal right of due process, as represented immigrants are approximately 10.5x as likely to win their case to stay in the United States as unrepresented immigrants. In an attempt to help fight to protect immigrants rights, “California passed a bill to provide $25 million to support immigration services, and advocates there are seeking an additional $60 million in this year’s regular session to support urgently needed immigration legal services.” Protecting the rights of immigrants, in addition to fighting against the oppressive deportation regime, helps prevent immigrants from ending up in detention by giving them a way to dispute their cases (Bryant).

Additionally, part of the reason that immigration detention is so prevalent is the inefficiency of the immigration law system. The current border situation has separated children from their parents, even leading to the death of two children in Border Patrol Custody, demonstrating clear human rights violations at the border. To fix this and the inefficiency of the border patrol system for far less than the cost of building a wall at the border, we could allow the Department of Homeland Security to see credible-fear cases to completion instead of sending them to the immigration courts, where they sit idly for years due to the backlog of these courts. This backlog is what allows immigration detention to be so lucrative–immigrants can be trapped in detention centers for years while their cases linger in limbo. Additionally, it’s also crucial to attack this backlog head-on to decrease the amount of immigration detention that happens. This can be achieved by establishing a border court division of the immigration court system to hear cases denied by asylum officers and overall increasing the size of the current immigration court system. This would allow cases to be heard more quickly and therefore fight against the detention that occurs as a result of the waitlists for case hearings (Meissner and Pierce).

Grassroots Organizing

While there are strong solutions for each facet of the problem surrounding immigration and the prison industrial complex, these problems require major legislative change and are barred by the special interest groups that stand in the way of this change with much more money and resources than public interest groups. While reversing the prevalent anti-immigrant sentiment, reforming the contracts between private prisons and the U.S. government, fighting against corporate lobbying, and reforming the immigration legal system seems like an overwhelming and impossible task, taking a step back and looking at the ways that social movements have prevailed in the past allows us to reframe this feat as a challenge with clear, possible solutions.

Firstly, reversing the anti-immigrant sentiment caused by the anti-immigrant propaganda and the criminalization of immigration is a social issue more than any of the other challenges in this plan. As such, it can be done without any policy change, and only requires the changing of public opinion. This can happen on an individual scale through having one-on-one conversations with those that oppose immigrants and explaining the racial propaganda that has been spewed by politicians. However, this is extremely small in size and scale, and can often be unsuccessful. As a result, it’s important to learn about large-scale social movements. The one thing that most modern movements have in common is protest. The American Friends Service Committee argues that one of the most crucial ways to help immigrants is by protesting against deportation and promoting messages that decriminalize immigrants and support them (Gottlieb). This helps sway social opinions in a way that is much more large-scale.

Finally, a way to fight for both social change through education and legislative change is through tabling. Tabling involves raising awareness, getting signatures for petitions, and recruiting people to join your organization (CALPIRG Students). In addition to being an easy way to raise awareness for your campaign, as tabling often involves large signs, tabling allows for political change through aforementioned petitions and recruitment. These can be used to make political change by sending petitions to legislators to attempt to convince them to make change and by recruiting people to continue the work that an organization is doing. By making large organizations with a specific public interest goal and a large number of volunteers, raising money, gaining signatures, raising awareness, educating people, and even recruiting more volunteers becomes much easier. It’s through these last actions that everyday citizens can make social and/or political change.

What public interest research groups possess that private interest groups don’t is, as can be understood by the name, public interest. Once educated about a subject, the average citizen tends to agree with public interest over private interest. Additionally, many people are passionate about public interest, and, though they may lack the money that private interest groups have, have dedication and support that rivals the power that private interest groups possess. If said public interest can be mobilized to reform the private prison industry to one that’s incentivized to create a positive impact, reform the immigration law system to be more effective and protect the legal rights of immigrants, fight against big money and dark money in elections, and reverse the racialized anti-immigrant zeitgeist that America possesses as a result of the anti-immigration and criminalizing propaganda that politicians spew, immigration detention and corrupt prison detention could be reversed and replaced with a system that is just for all.

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