At the most basic level, the criminal punishment and immigration enforcement systems are fully intertwined: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collaborates with local police to target immigrants for deportation and subcontracts with county jails to incarcerate them. Over the past several years, many state-level criminal justice reform efforts have led to an increase in empty prison and jail beds that ICE has then used to detain immigrants. The number of immigrants incarcerated in the federal prison system for immigration crimes continues to grow (many “immigrants” being Indigenous folks to Turtle Island). It is estimated that 4 out of 5 people in ICE detention are held in private detention facilities (ACLU, 2019). Today, private prison corporations like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management and Training Corporation (MTC) own or operate facilities that hold the overwhelming majority of detained by ICE.
Efforts to reform the criminal punishment system and decarcerate state prisons have thankfully gained considerable traction in recent years. But as prisons reduce their populations, ICE has filled the beds with detained immigrants.
We’ve seen this all over — in New Jersey, Hudson County, and Louisiana to name a few.
In 2017, Louisiana passed significant criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing the prison population by ten percent over ten years. In the years that followed, the state prison population decreased, leaving thousands of empty prison beds. Much like in New Jersey, ICE decided to swoop in. Over the course of a year, ICE contracted with seven additional facilities in the state, securing new contracts to detain 6,000 more immigrants — the exact capacity by which the prison population had decreased. While the intention in Louisiana was to reduce the rate of incarceration, without considering the intrinsic connection between ICE and the prison systems, those beds were filled by ICE.
For years, we have heard criminalizing language that reinforces stereotypes about “good”immigrants who deserve relief versus “bad” ones who are disposable. Not only has this hurt our ability to challenge racist and xenophobic immigration laws and policies, but it is also coded in anti-Black racism, intentionally dividing the movements for immigration reform and prison abolition.
It is critical that we connect local efforts to defund the police and the prison-industrial complex (PIC) with the broader call to defund ICE and Border Patrol. ICE is one of the largest police agencies in the country, and private prison corporations continue to benefit from its increase. Understanding the relationships and similarities amongst all law enforcement agencies is vital to both abolitionist movements and immigrant advocacy.
In order for all of our communities to thrive, we must view the entire prison industrial complex as interconnected, unable to be disentangled, and work to abolish all racist and oppressive systems.