Private equity firms now hold contracts at nearly two-thirds of the country’s 90 federally designated immigration detention facilities, according to new research shared with The Lever — meaning opaque, unaccountable, and profit-gouging Wall Street interests are set to make hundreds of millions of dollars detaining and surveilling the country’s immigrants.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take power, with plans for mass deportations and heightened surveillance of undocumented immigrants, the private interests that make their money from immigration enforcement stand to benefit — and could help push these immigration crackdowns forward.
Private equity has many sins to answer for. Making profits from immigrant detention make them complicit in the crimes of human trafficking. Can we prosecute them? Fine them? Send them to jail for lengthy sentences? Force them to fund their own incarceration?