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These centers are no place for children. Children are supposed to grow up and have great memories and experiences. Instead, all of the children who were forced to stay in these centers will now grow up to be traumatized. In fact, these children did nothing wrong to even be here in the first place and now they are in a foreign child prison without there parents. This is just a very sad experience for them that will have a long lasting stress on them, most likely for life.

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99% of people, if you showed them this picture, would think it is a photo of a prison. They would all be wrong because it is actually an immigrant migration center. However, there is not much of a difference from the outside, the inside, or how the people inside are treated.

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The video provided shows a glimpse of life inside of the typical immigrant detention center. After being separated from his family for months after being thousands of miles away, a man is finally reunited with his family. The migrants are obviously very excited to be back together, but unfortunately most families do not get this happy ending.

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NTL 4/17 Part 2: An inside look at an ICE detention center

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Families often times cannot get in contact with the family members who are stuck in these centers. In the video provided, there was a story about how a family lost track of their member that is in these detainment centers after they got transferred. The sad truth is that there are hundreds of stories exactly like this one. Sometimes families don't even know where their loved ones even are anymore.

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Christina Fialho Speaks with Splinter News About Medical Neglect in Immigration Detention

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This video from Time speaks for itself. There are many immigrant women on the hard cold floor with no blankets or anything, only a sleeping bag. These people are mothers and grandmothers and no one would want that for their own family.

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What Is Happening at Migrant Detention Centers? Here's What to Know

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Adults and children have been held for days, weeks, or even months in cramped cells. Here's what to know about the conditions.

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This scholar article goes in depth about the United Kingdom detention centers. The key points are that it is expensive to keep people in these centers. In 2019, the average cost of each inmate was 95 British Pounds, or roughly 125 U.S. dollars. There are a few differences between U.S. and UK centers though. The most interesting is U.S. centers are getting more "inmates" while the UK centers' numbers are going down.

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"Today, privately run prisons have become the government’s default detention centers for undocumented migrants." The reason that most of these center are run are purely for profit. The more prisoners or in this case illegal immigrants they have, the more money they get. What this means is that there is an incentive to keep these migrants in the centers so they can get more money.

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A surging inmate population in the 1980s led to a boom in for-profit prisons. Today, privately run prisons have become the government's default detention centers for undocumented migrants.

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For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business

An inmate population surge in the 1980s led to the growth of for-profit prisons. Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

As the Trump administration continues to crack down on undocumented immigrants, the majority of them will be sent to detention facilities run by private companies. "Private prisons. They are cashing in on President Trump's get-tough policies at the border." How did immigration detention become more than a billion-dollar industry? And does it matter that detention is now heavily privatized? Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz grew up gay in El Salvador, where he says he was persecuted for years, targeted by gangs and extorted. After receiving death threats, he fled to the United States hoping for asylum, was caught crossing the border and sent to a detention facility in Adelanto, California. But when Cortez Diaz and others launched a hunger strike, they say the guards roughed them up, pepper sprayed them and threw some of them into hot showers. The company that runs Adelanto, GEO Group, says these claims are completely baseless. But Cortez Diaz's lawyer, Rachel Steinback, says she believes the problems at Adelanto were exacerbated because of the fact that the facility is privately run. "The main goal of a private prison company is to maximize profit, and to maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures. All of the incentive is to get more people in, hold them there for longer and provide them with the barest necessities possible." But GEO Group says they are proud of their long-standing record of providing high-quality detention services that meet standards set by the government. The use of private companies took hold in the 1980s, as the country faced a crisis: overcrowded and unsafe public prisons. "American business is becoming bullish on prisons." And a new company, the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, now called CoreCivic, offered an alternative. "At CCA, we have an answer to your problems." "We intend to be the IBM, if you will, of the corrections business." But the idea of prisons for profit was met with skepticism. "A highly controversial idea: turning the jail keys over to private business and trying to make crime pay to investors." James Stewart, a Justice Department official, was studying the issue. "They had no history, and you're saying, 'What's your experience?' They go, 'Well, um, we'll get a warden. We'll hire a couple of people to train them. We can do it.' And you're like, 'Uh, I'm not sure this is going to work,' right?" "What about the prisoners? Who is accountable for their welfare? Critics of private prisons say making a profit off imprisonment is not compatible with the administration of justice." But the test of the controversial idea came not with prisoners, but with immigrants. "President Carter today declared parts of Florida to be under a state of emergency because of the enormous influx of Cuban refugees." "Illegal aliens, more than a million of them in the past year, have come across the Mexican border." Immigration authorities were overwhelmed. "Part of the problem, says the Immigration Service, is that there are not enough places to hold all the illegal immigrants." "They were scratching their heads saying, 'What are we going to do?'" The Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, the predecessor to ICE, turned to the private sector. "INS was the first government agency to really come out strongly for privatization. I mean, they were under the gun to do it." Richard Crane believed privatization would not lower standards and could lead to better conditions. "A lot of people had the misimpression that, in order for them to make a profit, they had to cut corners. When I was with CCA, they didn't cut corners." "This construction site in Houston, Texas, will soon become the first completely free enterprise prison in the United States. It is being built to detain up to 300 aliens charged with entering this country illegally and awaiting deportation hearings." "It was like a proof of concept. What it did is it provided evidence that this could work and it could be, you could get more for the same amount of money, and right now we needed more." "We built the facility in six months..." Building on that success, the industry began to expand. "The private prisons are clean, spacious and well-managed." "In here, it's enchanted, I mean very enchanted." Soon, private companies were running local, state and later federal jails and prisons. "They will find ways to economize. And so we said, 'Look, if you're going, going to have the private sector, you're going to have to be sure you have inspections. That's part of the price. You have to build that into the contract.'" "The denial of freedom is now clearly big business." But over the years, problems began to make headlines. "Arizona inmates rioted twice at this private prison in less than a month." "New questions are being raised tonight about the wisdom of turning public prisons over to private operators." "Charges have been filed against them now in three other states and the Justice Department says it is watching closely." Civil rights groups like the ACLU argued that private companies shouldn't be performing a government function. "Handing control of prisoners over to a for-profit company is a recipe for abuse and neglect. There are serious human costs that have been documented over and over again." But companies like CoreCivic say that they maintain high standards of care for detainees and that, in fact, their sole job is to help the government solve problems, including the fluctuating need for detention space. The government has expanded its detention of immigrants over the years - increasingly so starting under the Clinton administration. And private companies have stepped up. "Immigrant detention has turned into a gold rush for the private corrections industry." Alonzo Peña had spent his career in customs and immigration enforcement. But when he became deputy director of ICE in 2008, he says he saw widespread problems with detention. Issues were apparent in government-run facilities, but Peña says that many of complaints coming in were about privately-run ones. "These private companies, it wasn't their priority, uh, to ensure that the highest standards were being met. When I found out that guards mistreated people, uh, you know, violated women, abused women, didn't provide medical care, those things troubled me. And I kept thinking why are we not able to prevent things?" Peña says ICE shares the blame. "We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical, but unfortunately it was in the execution and the monitoring, and the auditing, we fell behind, fell short." "Immigration detention has been the private prison industry's fastest growing sector for years." ICE says they thoroughly investigate complaints of misconduct, and hold contractors to high standards. Today, about 70 percent of detained immigrants are overseen by private companies, according to an analysis of ICE data. "We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally." With these companies already so enmeshed in immigration enforcement, Peña says they're here to stay. The question is where we go from here. "It's important that the government maintain good oversight of these companies. Because they're not citizens, they're not going to be afforded the same protections. We're dealing with human beings. That's the thing not to be lost." "There are some real advantages to having the private sector. But, like anything else, it has to be reasonably well controlled and paid attention to. Vigilance is the price of freedom." Rachel Steinback says lawsuits like the one she has filed on behalf of Cortez Diaz and some of the other hunger strikers can help hold private companies accountable. "There's very little transparency. So I think they, they feel like they can operate with impunity, do whatever they want and get away with it." Cortez Diaz is no longer in detention. Last year, a judge granted him asylum and the opportunity to start a new life in the United States.

An inmate population surge in the 1980s led to the growth of for-profit prisons. Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

Thomas W. Beasley had something for sale, and figured he could market it the same as any other merchandise. "You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers," he told an interviewer.

That was three decades ago. Only Mr. Beasley wasn't hawking new wheels, beachfront property or beef patties. His stock in trade was prison bars. As a co-founder of Corrections Corporation of America in 1983, and with a get-tough-on-crime spirit ascendant in the country, he sold lockup space to federal and state governments that were jailing people faster than they could find room in their own institutions.
[In a new book, an investigative journalist goes undercover as a guard to get behind the scenes of the private prison industry. Read our review.]
Mr. Beasley's company, renamed CoreCivic two years ago, became a leader in what is now a roughly $4-billion-a-year American industry: for-profit prisons, privately owned and operated. Some bad-to-the-bone criminals are among the people guarded by private prisons. But a key function these days is watching over undocumented immigrants. Their detention centers, located mainly in the South and the West, are where the government sends most people caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

How ably these companies discharge their duty - or not - shapes this Retro Report video, the latest in a documentary series examining major news stories of the past and their continuing impact. The treatment of migrants has new urgency in the Trump era, given this administration's efforts at strict border control, which include detaining large numbers of children. Data obtained by The New York Times showed that in mid-September, 12,800 migrant children were held in federally contracted shelters, five times the number in custody a little over a year earlier.

One picture of private prisons captured in the video includes barely edible food, indifferent health care, guard brutality and assorted corner-cutting measures. It is framed by the experience of Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz, a gay man from El Salvador who fled through Mexico to the United States after enduring what he described as persecution and death threats in his homeland. Captured at the California border, he was sent to a private detention center run by GEO Group, formerly the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. This was in Adelanto, Calif., about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Mr. Cortez Diaz, 26, was freed after a judge granted him asylum last November, but not before he and other detainees staged a hunger strike to protest their treatment at Adelanto. Prison guards beat and pepper-sprayed them, they say, and they are now suing GEO and federal and local authorities for what they say were rights violations.

"The conditions in the detention center, they're bad, right down to the food," Mr. Cortez Diaz told Retro Report. He added, "They don't care if someone is sick, if the food goes bad. That's how we came to say we have to protest."

A spokesman for GEO, Pablo E. Paez, dismissed those assertions as "completely baseless" and said that the federal authorities reviewed that situation and "found that the officers acted in accordance with established protocol."

Complaints about private prisons are not new. They go back almost to the advent of the prisons themselves in the 1980s. Those were the Reagan years, when government sought to shift some of its functions to private hands. At the same time, voters wanted harsher measures taken against criminals. Thus, cellblock populations rapidly grew, and prisons became alarmingly overcrowded.

But the appetite for locking people up was not matched by a willingness to spend taxpayer money on new government-run cells and support services. Enter for-profit prisons. They were ready to bear some of the burden - for a fee, of course. At federal and state levels, they now operate in more than two dozen states, often in relatively remote regions where jobs can be scarce. It is not unusual in some states for big city crime to become a rural area's economic development.

The private companies, with CoreCivic and GEO Group dominant, tout their virtues by saying they build and operate prisons more cheaply than governments can, what with the public sector's many mandates. Their day-to-day operations are similarly more efficient and less costly, they assert, and they do it all without compromising public safety. The bottom line, they say, is that they allow governments to free up public funds for pursuits that mean more to most taxpayers than how felons are jailed.

"Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed," said Rodney E. King, CoreCivic's public affairs manager.

Critics tell a different story. They cite moments like a 2015 riot to protest poor conditions at a prison in Arizona run by another major private player, Management & Training Corporation. Earlier at that same institution, three inmates had escaped and murdered two people.

Stories abound of scrimping by prison operators, with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards and hiring shortages. At immigrant detention centers, operators see little need to offer extensive educational programs or job training, since people held there are mostly destined for deportation.

"To maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures," Rachel Steinback, a lawyer for Mr. Cortez Diaz and other Adelanto hunger strikers, told Retro Report.

Beyond pragmatic considerations, philosophical questions have dogged private prisons from the start. They boil down to this: If someone violates society's code of behavior, is it not up to government to punish the offender as society's representative, and not some profit-seeking entity? As far back as 1985, M. Wayne Huggins, then the sheriff of Fairfax County, Va., asked, "What next will we be privatizing? Will we have private police forces? Will we have private fire departments? Will we have private armies?" Those questions have not disappeared.

Private companies house about 9 percent of the nation's total prison population. But they take care of a much higher share of immigrant detainees - 73 percent by some accounts. Alonzo Peña, a former deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, acknowledges that the companies have all too often fallen short. "It wasn't their priority to ensure that the highest standards were being met," Mr. Peña said.

ICE, he said, deserves some blame. "We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical," he said. "But unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short."

Studies suggest that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits. And in 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout of their use at the federal level. Reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did on taking office.

The Trump administration leaves no doubt that it will detain as many undocumented immigrants as it can and send them to for-profit centers. And to help make sure that happens, the companies spend millions on campaigns and lobbying efforts (not unlike businesses that sell cars, real estate or hamburgers).

They have thus far figured out how to prevail, a point noted by Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school. Ms. Eisen explored this in a recent book, "Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration." Her conclusion: "There is no reason to think the private prison industry will go away anytime soon."

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For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business (Published 2018)

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A surging inmate population in the 1980s led to a boom in for-profit prisons. Today, privately run prisons have become the government's default detention centers for undocumented migrants. Thomas W. Beasley had something for sale, and figured he could market it the same as any other merchandise.

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There has been numerous reported deaths across the country within these centers. The article provided explains that there are systematic problems with basic care within these establishments. A child died from dehydration which just really shows how inhumane these places are. The facility was shut down but there are many other facilities just like it.

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When we learned last week of the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, we were serving as government experts briefing a delegation from Congress before lawmakers visited family detention facilities in South Texas.

The news that Jakelin had died in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody after crossing the border from Mexico during her journey from Guatemala came as a shock to many, but not to us. This was the very danger we had warned of in 2014 during our first inspection of a family detention facility in Artesia, N.M.

For four years, we have been inspecting detention facilities as contractors for the Department of Homeland Security. We are government experts in the medical and mental health care of children and families in immigration detention. Jakelin was apprehended in a remote desert in New Mexico and never held in a family detention center, which makes her case slightly different from the ones we've studied closely. But we fear that unless U.S. authorities stop detaining children, Jakelin will not be the last child to die in government custody.

(Contacted by The Washington Post, a DHS spokesman said Jakelin's case has nothing to do with family detention centers: "Upon encountering a large group of illegal aliens in one of the most remote parts of our border, Border Patrol agents professionally and promptly took the appropriate action to get Jakelin Caal Maquin the needed medical attention. She spent no time in a family detention center. The Border Patrol saves more than 4,300 people every year in the border environment; unfortunately, they were unable to save one more last week.")

We first visited a family detention facility in Artesia four years ago on a contract with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. After that trip, we documented how ill-prepared DHS was in providing adequate care for children in its custody at the Artesia facility. We found systemic problems in the provision of basic care, including a lack of pediatric providers, widespread problems with language access and poor coordination among multiple agencies.

As we toured Artesia then, a member of our inspection team who had no medical training spotted a 16-month-old child who was listless and sickly. We referred the child to the medical unit and set about reviewing the child's medical record with staff. That record documented that the mother had brought her child to the medical unit multiple times over a 10-day period for a diarrheal illness, yet the child received no definitive treatment, and the mother was repeatedly sent away with reassurance, some Pedialyte and instructions to continue breast feeding. Over the course of 10 days, under the care of government physicians (many of whom lacked adequate pediatric training and experience), the toddler lost nearly one-third of their body weight, a finding consistent with life-threatening dehydration.

Experienced pediatric providers would have considered serious dehydration at 10 percent body-weight loss and sent the child to an emergency room for intravenous fluids and further evaluation and treatment. Until we brought our findings about the documented weight loss to the attention of the medical staff, though, no medical provider had noticed how critically ill the child was. Once staffers at the facility recognized how close the child had come to death from the easily treatable condition of dehydration under the care and custody of the U.S. government, they expressed genuine humility and alarm.

In our debriefing to multiple agencies, including high-ranking DHS officials, we placed our government on notice. We warned them that the children arriving at these facilities were vulnerable and medically and psychologically at risk. These children required comprehensive medical and mental health care. We pointed out that the government had narrowly averted a tragedy in this case and warned that if it continued to detain at-risk children, loss of life was a real possibility.

Because of this and other findings of systemic failures to provide adequate care, our team recommended that the Artesia detention facility be closed immediately. Within two weeks, the recommendation of our inspection team was heeded, and Artesia was permanently shut down. Unfortunately, the closing of Artesia was followed by the opening of new family detention facilities at Karnes and Dilley, Tex., the facilities visited last week by the congressional delegation.

And despite our repeated efforts to warn the government of ongoing harm to children, family detention has not only continued but also been expanded greatly under the Trump administration. This rapid expansion has put more children in harm's way. In July 2018, after our efforts to warn officials within DHS had failed to produce any results, we alerted Congress about our concerns that plans to expand family detention created an imminent risk to the health and safety of children.

Detaining immigrant children harms them and puts them at great risk. We are not alone in realizing this. Since we first spoke out, 14 medical professional associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association and many others have all expressed unequivocal support for our call to prevent harm to immigrant children caused by detention. CBP officials and others working in the immigration system are not deliberately trying to harm children. But when the confinement of children is prioritized over care, risks already posed by conditions of detention foreseeably escalate.

A civilized and humane society would greet frail and vulnerable children arriving on our border with compassion and care. Children coming into the custody of the United States should be immediately screened for both physical and mental health problems by qualified health professionals. Children should be provided with humane care and treatment in a nurturing community setting. Only then should asylum and other legal procedures proceed, and those processes should proceed without the unnecessary detention of the children and their families. This approach, prioritizing care first, would have give children like Jakelin a fighting chance.

As physicians, we have a duty to speak out against policies and practices that threaten the health and safety of children and their families. For years, the medical community has warned that the toxic stresses of detention itself carry great risks to the health and safety of children, and as such, family detention cannot be justified.

We can and we must prevent more children from suffering like Jakelin. America is better than this. We owe these children care and compassion - not confinement.

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The Washington Post: We Warned DHS that a migrant child could die in U.S. custody. Now one has.

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Read the original article by Government Accountability Project clients Dr. Scott Allen and Dr. Pamela McPherson here. When we learned last week of the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, we were serving as government experts briefing a delegation from Congress before lawmakers visited family detention facilities in South

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Immigrant detention centers are notorious for having very poor living conditions. As you can see from the photo, the cells that hold the immigrants are way too small and overcrowded. These centers are not only inhumane, they are very unsanitary and breeding grounds for disease to spread easily.

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The L.A. times has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in hopes for the release of records detailing allegations of widespread sexual abuse and harassment at immigration detention centers. This is important because it shows that there are a lot of things that happen in these centers that the public either doesn't know or overlooks. There is not much empathy towards these immigrants who are just humans like everyone else that want a better life for themselves and their family by coming to the U.S.

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The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeking the release of records detailing allegations of widespread sexual abuse and harassment at immigration detention centers.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles followed a recent Times investigation that uncovered hundreds of allegations by detainees in California of violence and abuse. Few of the allegations resulted in criminal charges, a lack of accountability that fostered unchecked violence within the facilities.

The Times was also among several outlets that reported on the alleged forced sterilization of over a dozen women at a detention center in Georgia.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Tens of thousands of immigrants are held in detention centers across the U.S. as they await deportation proceedings, which can take months or years to be decided. Many are asylum seekers and have no criminal background. Others were arrested by ICE in targeted sweeps, or are green-card holders with criminal convictions.

The vast majority of ICE detainees are held in facilities that are owned or managed by for-profit corporations, which are supposed to comply with care and safety standards set by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But several media and internal investigation reports have documented widespread lapses in oversight by ICE, resulting in a patchwork system of privately run facilities.

Starting in June, The Times submitted five requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking detainee complaint data, investigation reports, and other detention policy documents from ICE and the DHS Office of Inspector General. Both agencies have failed to provide such records, leading to the lawsuit.

"When human lives are in the government's care - whether that's in schools, public hospitals, detention centers, etc. - there is a certain bare minimum standard of treatment that we expect," said Selina MacLaren, an associate attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, which has been retained as co-counsel by The Times to represent the news outlet in the lawsuit. "The Freedom of Information Act was designed precisely for this type of situation, to shed light on whether the government is meeting the public's expectations. Unless reporters and members of the public flip the switch, we remain in the dark about what government officials are doing."

The Freedom of Information Act guarantees access to a wide range of government records deemed fundamental to "the functioning of a democratic society." Under the law, any member of the public may submit a request to a federal agency for documents.

According to the Government Accountability Office, Homeland Security receives the most FOIA requests of all federal agencies, processing roughly 40% of all requests in any given year. The department has struggled to manage requests, often resulting in a backlog.

DHS was named in 144 FOIA lawsuits in 2019, making it the second-most-sued federal agency after the U.S. Department of Justice, according to the FOIA Project.

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L.A. Times files lawsuit seeking records on abuse claims at U.S. immigration detention centers

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The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeking the release of records detailing allegations of widespread sexual abuse and harassment at immigration detention centers. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles followed a recent Times investigation that uncovered hundreds of allegations by detainees in California of violence and abuse.

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Immigrant detention centers have been steadily increasing the amount of people in them for years now. in fact the number of immigrants in these centers has increased over 10x from 1994 to today. This article provides a brief history of detention centers and how the centers have changed over the years. The website also advocated for communities, not cages for the immigrants.

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The United States government maintains the world's largest immigration detention system

Immigration detention is the unjust and inhumane practice of incarcerating immigrants while they await a determination of their immigration status or potential deportation. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, the United States government detained over 500,000 people in a sprawling system of over 200 jails across the country run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

ICE has an appalling record of abuse. Many Americans are shocked to learn that in ICE detention centers people are deprived of their liberty, denied access to lawyers, separated from their families and loved ones, and are subject to severe medical neglect. Since 2003 over 200 people have died in ICE custody.

ICE contracts with both local governments and private prison companies, such as the GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, to operate the majority of its vast network of facilities. This includes dedicated immigration detention centers as well as local and state jails, a model that creates a perverse financial incentive to keep people incarcerated. Private prison companies profit and local governments make money to pad their shrinking budgets through lucrative federal contracts.

Immigrants in detention can be undocumented or documented immigrants, including people whose immigration status is not current, is expired or is under review. The U.S. locks up survivors of torture, people seeking asylum, visa holders, people who have been granted the permanent right to live in the U.S., people who have lived here for years and may have American citizen spouses and children, individuals with mental health and medical conditions and other vulnerable groups including pregnant women and families with children - even babies.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Simply put, people navigating their immigration case should be able to do so with their loved ones and in community, not behind bars in immigration detention. The majority of people in detention has been living in the U.S. for years, have families here, and are established members of their communities. People seeking asylum often have strong community ties with loved ones waiting to welcome them to the United States. And for those that need support, they can access it through community-based groups that offer services to help people navigate their immigration proceedings.

Detention in Numbers (Fiscal Year 2019)

Average daily population (ADP) in detention

50,165

Number of people detained for the year

510,854

Average cost per day

$126.52 for adult detention
$318.79 for family detention

Detention budget

$3.2 billion

Number of facilities

215

Percent of people held in facilities operated by private companies

81 percent

Number of deaths since 2003

214

History of Immigration Detention in the United States

The United States is the world's leading incarcerator with over two million people in prisons and jails across the country. As the U.S. expanded prisons in the 1980s and 1990s, the detention of immigrants, once a little known practice, began to take shape.

In the early 1980s several thousand Cuban and Haitian refugees arriving on Florida's shores each year were swept into newly opened detention facilities. Immigration policy began to emulate the criminal justice system in the late '80s when, during the height of the War on Drugs, Congress amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to require the mandatory detention of immigrants with certain criminal convictions. This meant that their detention was automatic and compulsory, without a hearing or any consideration of their circumstances.

The 1990s brought on a paradigm shift in immigration policy, leading to detention being a primary means of immigration enforcement. In 1996, the U.S. enacted legislation that dramatically expanded the use of detention. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) increased the scope of who could be subject to mandatory detention. The 1996 laws also rendered any non-U.S. citizen, including legal permanent residents, vulnerable to detention and deportation.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS was divided into U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It also moved from the Department of Justice to the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Immigration was now a national security issue and nowhere was this clearer than in ICE's strategic plan for 2003-2012, Operation Endgame, which stated its purpose to, "promote the public safety and national security by ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens through the fair and effective enforcement of the nation's immigration laws."

Under the Obama administration, the implementation of the detention bed quota and the expansion of deportation programs such as 287(g), Secure Communities and the Criminal Alien Program, funneled thousands of immigrants into detention centers. In 2014, we saw even more detention expansion when the White House responded to an influx of Central American refugee families with the resurgence of family detention.

The Trump administration has further expanded these parts of the deportation dragnet - increasing the number of 287(g) agreements and other forms of entanglement with local law enforcement and the criminal legal system - while also ramping up community raids and eliminating the policies that deprioritized detention and deportation for some immigrants under the previous administration.

The drastic expansion of mandatory detention combined with a skyrocketing detention budget has created a sprawling and unaccountable system of mass detention. As a result, the number of individuals detained has grown dramatically. The average daily population of detained immigrants increased from approximately 5,000 in 1994, to 19,000 in 2001, and to over 50,000 in 2019.

After three decades of expansion, the detention system now captures and holds as many as 500,000 immigrants each year.

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The United States government maintains the world's largest immigration detention system Immigration detention is the unjust and inhumane practice of incarcerating immigrants while they await a determination of their immigration status or potential deportation. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, the United States government detained over 500,000 people in a sprawling system of over 200 jails across the country run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

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Official U.S. I.C.E. Immigrant Detention Center Locator

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Official U.S. I.C.E. Immigrant Detention Center Locator

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To show just how many immigrants are stuck in detention centers in the U.S. alone, I included a locator on our country's official immigrant and custom enforcement's website. These
centers are for the most part very close to our borders instead of towards thee center of our country for obvious reasons. It is interesting to see that there are much more centers near the Mexico border than the Canada border. This is because our country and society feels more "threatened" by Mexican immigrants.