A recent poll commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union and YouGov found that 68 percent of voters want the federal government to stop pursuing contracts with for-profit prison corporations to open private immigrant detention centers. Americans have become more aware of the inhumane conditions and twisted business model of the private prison industry, and want President Biden to follow through on his promise to “end for-profit detention centers.”

President Biden has repeatedly expressed strong and deep-seated opposition to the use of for-profit prisons to detain immigrants and called for their closure. In April 2021, the president told immigrant rights activists in Georgia that “there should be no private prisons, period, none, period. Private detention centers, they should not exist, and we are working to close all of them.”

Despite having a popular mandate to end the practice, the Biden administration has continued to go against its own stated policy and values — along with the wishes of the majority of Americans — by seeking out new contracts with private prison companies to detain immigrants throughout the country.

During his successful campaign, Biden’s “Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants” included this unequivocal pledge: “End for-profit detention centers. No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence.”

Similarly, Biden’s “Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice” stated that he will “end the federal government’s use of private prisons” and “make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”

This pledge has broad support from the American people, and they want the president to follow through.

Shortly after his inauguration, the president issued an executive order to phase out its contracts with private prison companies, but the order did not apply to private immigrant detention facilities, where nearly 80 percent of detained immigrants are held, often in brutal conditions.

This loophole gave private prison corporations an opportunity to land new contracts and stay in the business of incarcerating people. For-profit companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group have worked to turn facilities whose federal contracts to imprison people for the Department of Justice ended under the executive order into immigrant detention facilities. That way, they can make new lucrative contracts that profit off human misery.

While Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced his intention to shut down inhumane facilities in spring 2021, DHS is now moving to award new contracts to private prison companies.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already started contracting with one private facility in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania and may soon enter contracts with for-profit, private prisons in Leavenworth, Kansas and Mason, Tennessee. These locations, as is too often the case in immigrant detention, have troubling records of abusive conditions and are located far away from communities with immigration attorneys, making it difficult for people to pursue their cases.

There are even signals that ICE may expand a private immigrant detention center run by the for-profit GEO Group in Georgia, the very state where the president promised voters that he planned to close all private detention centers.

Following a sharp decline in 2020 partly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people held in immigrant detention has started to swell once again, increasing by more than 50 percent since Biden took office. Now, as cases of the omicron variant of COVID-19 surge, the need to fulfill the president’s repeated pledge to end for-profit immigrant detention has become even more urgent. The administration should be releasing people from detention as a public health measure, but so far has not announced its intention to do so in any systematic way. Meanwhile, people aren’t receiving booster shots and are typically confined to tight, crowded spaces where it is impossible to socially distance, leading to waves of new COVID-19 infections.

The administration should listen to the voters — and President Biden — and end its misguided pursuit of new detention contracts with for-profit, private prison corporations.

It’s time to close private prisons and shut down the immigrant detention machine notorious for COVID-19 surges, physical brutality, sexual abuse, racist mistreatment, and denials of due process, not expand it.

Twenty years have passed since the first detainees arrived in Guantánamo Bay, making it the longest-standing war prison in U.S. history. Since 2002, 779 Muslim men and boys have been held at Guantánamo, nearly all of them without charge or trial. Today, 39 men remain indefinitely detained there, and 27 of them have never even been charged with any crime. Fourteen of those 27 have been cleared for transfer or release, some for years. Many of the remaining men are torture survivors; the CIA formerly disappeared some of them at “black sites” before our government sent them to Guantánamo. All of the prisoners have been exposed to the physical and psychological trauma associated with prolonged indefinite detention.

Around the world, Guantánamo is a symbol of racial and religious injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law. Our government’s embrace of systematic torture shattered lives, shredded this country’s reputation in the world, and compromised national security. To this day, it has refused to release the full details of the torture program or to provide justice and redress for all the many victims.

As we mark this 20th anniversary, it is worth pausing to reflect on the fact that all the teenagers and many young adults alive today have never known a United States without the stain of Guantánamo. They’ve seen three presidents pledge to close the prison without following through on that promise. Guantánamo is now embedded not only in our conscience, but in American culture, as recent critically-acclaimed films about torture and its impact, like “The Report” and “The Mauritanian,” show. Yet too many think Guantánamo is in our past or even that amends for abuses have been made, as a Jeopardy question and response last year showed. In response to the clue, “In 2015 Congress authorized payments of $4.44 million to each of these people, $10,000 for each day of their captivity,” a Jeopardy! contestant wrongly answered “Guantánamo Bay prisoners.” There has been no such redress, and this shameful chapter of our history is still being written.

President George W. Bush transferred over 500 prisoners out of Guantánamo. President Barack Obama transferred approximately 200 men, and said he would shut the prison down, but failed. President Donald Trump reversed course and kept the prison open. Now it’s up to President Joe Biden to fulfill his pledge to finally close Guantánamo.

American Civil Liberties Union

END GUANTÁNAMO: HUMAN RIGHTS DISASTER

Tell President Biden to shut down Guantánamo Prison once and for all.

Last year, over 110 groups, which include 9/11 family members, urged President Biden to take concrete action. Their call joined a chorus that has ranged from the military to medical professionals, international jurists to human rights organizations and activists, to the late Sen. John McCain. Former government officials who support closure include five defense secretaries, eight secretaries of state, six national security advisors, five chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and dozens of retired generals and admirals.

At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Colleen Kelly, who lost her brother in the 9/11 attacks, told Congress that she hopes for “a resolution to the 9/11 Military Commission that provides answers to their questions, accountability for unlawful acts, justice too long denied, and a path to closing Guantánamo. Perhaps then, this long-festering, very personal yet collective national wound can truly begin to heal.” At the same hearing, Marine Corps Brigadier General John Baker, the Guantánamo military commissions’ chief defense counsel emphasized, “It is too late in the process for the current military commissions to do justice for anyone. The best that can be hoped for at this point, more than 20 years after the crimes were committed, is to bring this sordid chapter of American history to an end. And that end can only come through a negotiated resolution of the cases.”

The path forward is clear and achievable. President Biden has all the authority he needs to close Guantánamo in a way that reckons withs the harm done to men who have been tortured and imprisoned without charge or fair trials for two decades, while providing a measure of justice and resolution for victims’ family members. His administration can start by appointing a top level official who is specifically tasked with closing Guantánamo and is empowered to do so. It can transfer detainees who have not been, nor will be, charged with a crime to other countries where their rights will be respected and they can receive medical care and support services. Finally, if the government has enough evidence that is untainted by torture to prosecute prisoners — including those facing the death penalty — it should pursue plea agreements to finally resolve cases.

Twenty years ago, now- retired Marine Corps Major General Michael Lehnert was tasked with building the first cells at Guantánamo and setting up the prison. He told Congress at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the failure to close Guantánamo is now a painful reflection of this nation’s values in the last 20 years: “Who we are cannot be separated from what we do.”

The prisoners at Guantanamo — and indeed our nation — have lived with the legal and moral stain that the prison represents for far too long. We can’t look away from what our country has done. We need to face it and shut it down.

On January 11, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Garland v. Gonzalez, the latest in a series of cases the court has taken on immigration detention. The case presents a basic question: whether the federal government can lock immigrants up, for months or even years, without a hearing to determine if their detention is justified. And the Biden administration is decidedly on the wrong side of this fight.

The plaintiffs in Gonzalez are all people who were previously deported from the U.S., but came back because they faced persecution or torture in their countries of origin. One plaintiff, Arturo Martinez, was kidnapped by police officers after being deported to Mexico, tortured, and held for ransom. Another, Eduardo Gutierrez, was tortured by gang members because of his sexual orientation.

Arturo, Eduardo, and others like them were all screened by an asylum officer upon their return to the U.S.; all were found to have a bona fide claim to protection, and all were referred for legal proceedings to decide their protection claims. Under the immigration laws, they were legally entitled to remain in the country while their cases were being heard. But because of court backlogs, cases can take years to conclude, meaning that people are routinely detained for extremely long periods of time.

The issue before the Supreme Court is what process people like Arturo and Eduardo are entitled to, in order to determine if they should stay locked up or can be safely released to their families and communities. In the preceding decision, the Ninth Circuit interpreted the detention laws to require a bond hearing before an immigration judge after six months, based on its recognition that prolonged detention without a hearing raises serious due process concerns. This follows from long standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing that when it comes to civil detention, the touchstone for due process is a hearing before a neutral decision-maker to decide if someone’s imprisonment is justified. These protections are all the more critical when the government locks people up for months or years.

Yet despite its pledge to deliver a fair and humane immigration system, the Biden administration does not see things the same way. Instead, the Department of Justice argues that no hearings are required here because immigrants get paper “file reviews,” done solely by ICE — the jailer. But we know from experience that an ICE “file review” is no substitute for a hearing before a judge. Instead, ICE uses these reviews to rubber stamp detention for months or years, based on arbitrary reasons, or no reasons at all.

Even worse, denying people bond hearings can have life-threatening consequences. ICE’s record of abuse, neglect, and death makes clear that detention is dangerous — a fact that has only become clearer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, because detention cannot be made safe and humane, ICE must shut down its mass detention machine. But in the meantime, the government must at least provide due process to ensure that people are given a meaningful chance at release.

Beyond the denial of bond hearings, there is another way in which the Biden administration has picked the wrong side of this fight. The administration argues that a provision of the immigration laws prevents federal courts from entering a standard form of relief in civil rights cases — a class-wide injunction — in cases challenging the government’s detention and deportation practices. Practically, this is a systemic attack on immigrants’ rights.

The overwhelming majority of detained immigrants do not have lawyers, are unfamiliar with U.S. law, and often lack English language proficiency. These barriers to entry mean that most immigrants have no idea what legal claims they may have when their rights are abused, much less the resources to file individual lawsuits. Class actions and class-wide injunctions have thus been essential tools for advocates and courts to ensure that the government follows the law in its treatment of immigrants — tools that the Biden administration now wants eliminated. An administration that’s committed to fairness has no business trying to strip immigrant communities of one of the primary bulwarks for their rights. To say that the Biden administration is punching down is an understatement.

After the horrors of the prior administration, we had hoped for a Biden administration that would choose the right side of history and be serious about protecting immigrant communities. Instead, Gonzalez is yet another disappointment. But no matter what, the ACLU stands ready to fight for a future America where immigrants have the same rights, dignity, and freedom as everyone else — especially when their government fails them.