By: Sydney Umstead, News Editor
President Donald Trump signed multiple executive orders on his first day in office, one of which was a reversal of an executive order from former President Joe Biden which eliminated contracts with private prisons.
Under Trump’s reversal of Executive Order 14006, the federal government can create contracts with private prisons. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “The reversal also allows for new contracts between private prison corporations and the U.S. Marshals Service,” which despite Biden’s executive order “still uses private industry to house a significant portion of the more than 60,000 people under its supervision.”
Private prisons, or for-profit prisons, are facilities that receive profit from the number of people that they incarcerate. The Harvard International Review writes, “The process of prison privatization is simple: companies make contracts with their respective government in which they agree to manage correctional facilities in return for a payment from the state.”
As Trump’s other executive orders attempt to ignore birthright citizenship and threaten mass deportations, this could very well mean profit for these prison facilities. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that the Bureau of Prisons had started “to rely on private prisons in the 1980s to house incarcerated populations with specialized needs and undocumented individuals who are sentenced to federal prison.”
The two largest for-profit prison companies are CoreCivic and GeoGroup, which have the “most significant federal contracts with ICE,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Following the passage of the Laken Riley Act in the House of Representatives, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke out against the act and its relationship to for-profit correctional facilities.
The act “requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to detain certain non-U.S. nationals (aliens under federal law) who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting,” as highlighted by Congress.gov. Ocasio-Cortez criticized the act as “corruption in plain sight,” citing how Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters and how “these are the people who want you to believe, who want us to believe that they're trying to quote-unquote ‘keep criminals off the streets.’”
Cortez continued to say, “In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and … sent out for deportation without a day in court.”
The ACLU and other civil rights organizations are currently suing President Trump for some of his executive orders, including the denial of birthright citizenship.