Members Have Found Out About Ice Immigration Actions in Their Districts After the Fact. The Least We Can Do as Members of Congress Is to Provide Oversight and Keep Track of How Much DHS Is...

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, my amendment would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from entering into contracts with privatized immigration detention facilities for fiscal year 2018.

A study done by the Homeland Security Advisory Council's Subcommittee on Privatized Immigration Detention Facilities found that privatized detention facilities experienced a multitude of issues, including deficiencies in staffing, subpar medical care, inefficient abuse reporting systems, and a lack of transparency.

Further, an in-depth report on two of the country's private detentionfacilities show further injustices, such as inadequate access to legal information and services.

It is best that DHS is prohibited from doing business with these facilities until these issues are resolved and it is shown that these facilities meet ICE's Performance-Based National Detention Standards.

This amendment is necessary, as the government's reliance on privatized facilities will continue to grow, based on trends in detention. In fact, only 9.2 percent of detained individuals are in ICE-owned facilities. We must ensure that detained individuals are treated humanely and that they have access to due process.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. Chairman, studies have shown repeatedly that these private detention centers are of a lower quality than publicly owned facilities.

There is something very perverse about an industry in the private detention and private prison industry that basically profits off of mass incarceration and that has an economic incentive to get more people into detention, into jail, into prison, and, at the same time, tries to do everything that it can to cut costs and cut corners. In doing so, it fails not only its public charge and its duty, but also terribly fails the people entrusted to it.

The fact is that these private prisons, the detention centers, the companies that own them, hired lobbyists in California, for example, within the last few years. They had 70 lobbyists. One of the companies had 70 lobbyists on staff. They lobby for harsher criminal penalties.

Why? Because the more people that have to be detained, the more money they make. That simply is not how the criminal justice system should work and that is not how we should do detention within the immigration realm.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. Chairman, this is about treating people as humanely as possible. When profit is the main thing that drives the decisions on detention, incarceration, the conditions in which people are detained, then we are doing a severe injustice to those folks.

Because of that, I ask my colleagues to support this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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