A hot-button issue in America, immigration detention is rampant with abuse. The current model for this system began in the contemporary era and has grown rapidly since, becoming a cesspool of corruption as corporations increasingly become stakeholders in the detention industry.
A 2020 report on immigration detention under Trump by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that this issue has grown rapidly over the past twenty-five years. Populations in facilities have spiked by over four times to 56,000 people in over 220 facilities nationwide. Most of these facilities are private, as ICE contracts their detention centers to corporations such as GEO Group and CoreCivic. It further found that 81% of detainees are in these private facilities, in which abuse has proven to be disproportionately rampant.
To make matters worse, there is essentially no reasonable solution for detainees to be granted parole while ICE processes their immigration statuses, despite the fact that they have no criminal history. The 2020 HRW report revealed that ICE denied 99.1 percent of applications by detainees for parole from March-December 2019 to retain high facility populations, as higher capacities mean greater profits. There seems to be an influx of corporations involving themselves in “national security” affairs to profit off of overpopulated facilities. With no hope of escape from detention, the indefinite period of detention for immigrants seeking asylum proves to have torturous, sometimes lethal, effects.
Law Society & Review journal recently published a study on the psychological damage of detention, which found that most preventable deaths in detention facilities occur due to inadequate healthcare and a lack of both nutrition and sanitation. ICE’s private partners are often not at liberty to provide satisfactory resources and facilities for their detainees, which often results in human rights violations unchecked by the DHS. The HRW’s report also shed light on the consistent verbal abuse, tear-gassing, pepper-spraying, periods of solitary confinement, and the use of excessive force that asylum seekers had to endure at the hands of ICE wardens.
Those with disabilities are also neglected, seldom being given the assistance needed to access facilities.
The report also found that many asylum seekers are subjected to forced labor by wardens, receiving only one dollar as daily payment, if at all. In addition to the physical consequences of abuse in immigration detention, there are irrefutable subsequent psychological impacts on adults and children alike that cannot be overlooked.
Detainees of all ages are being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and psychotic traits, while some even indicated thoughts of self-harm and suicide. In tragic cases, miserable detainees act on their suicidal tendencies. According to research conducted by a team of scientists at the National Library of Medicine, the suicide rate in immigration detention increased from 3.3/100,000 to 17.4/100,000 in 2020, and nearly a third of the forty detainee deaths from 2017 to 2020 were suicides.
Such deaths were a direct result of the inhuman conditions in detention facilities; every investigation and subsequent report reveals an evident pattern of intentional abuse and neglect that is clearly linked to the deteriorating conditions of detainees. Because private companies will obtain a lower net profit through funding adequate services for their detainees, there is no incentive to do so; it is easier to cover up the deaths they are responsible for through faulty investigations and the denial of any wrongdoing.
If there is anything that the last decade has taught us, it is that involving the private sector in a field where human lives are at risk, especially in such a crucial issue as immigration, will most certainly result in at least several deaths due to reckless endangerment.
