Privately Run Immigration Detention System
In the United States (and other countries where the ideal of privatization is held up as a goal to break public employee unions and reduce the size of government), the government hires private security companies to detain immigrants.
Governments are giving contracts to private companies to expand detention and show voters that they are enforcing tough immigration laws.
Private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds in the United States.
In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.
No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998.
This has become a huge multinational industry. Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they claim they can meet demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.
But the explosion of private detention led to reports of terrible abuse, documented by the New York Times.
Human rights groups, such as the International Detention Coalition, say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend.
Immigration lawyers and pro-human rights groups worry that the development of an immigration-detention-industrial complex” has created a momentum pushing governments to detain immigrants for the profit of private companies.
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