For more than a decade and a half, In the Public Interest has studied the danger of the privatization of public goods and services. It’s bad enough that the public loses its control over how public education funds are spent (hint: too much on private schools for affluent families). It’s bad enough that the public loses control over water, the very substance to sustain life. It’s bad enough that we turn over control of our libraries to corporations. It’s bad enough that a local government chooses relatively small short term gain in exchange for extremely long term loss of revenue and control, like when Chicago sold off its parking meters.
But now we’re in an entirely new danger zone. We never anticipated that the threat of privatization would become almost cartoonishly sinister.
Politico reported in February that a group of military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, proposed to the White House a blueprint “to carry out mass deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a “small army” of private citizens empowered to make arrests.”
A request for information issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from earlier this month appears to show that plan is now in the works. It reads, in part:
“DHS ICE has an immediate need for Skip Tracing and Process Serving Services using Government furnished case data with identifiable information, commercial data verification, and physical observation services, to verify alien address information, investigate alternative alien address information, confirm the new location of aliens, and deliver materials/documents to aliens as appropriate.”
ICE recently signed $40 million contracts with two private companies, $7 million with SOS International and up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector Global Recovery Group LLC to perform “skip-tracing”—tracking down people ICE is looking for.
Meanwhile, Tennessee Lookout reports that the private prison operator CoreCivic saw a 55% increase in immigration detainee contracts, generating $215 million in the period from July to September of this year, while over the same period last year it generated $140 million.
These private contracts place another nearly impenetrable layer around ICE activities, insulating the agency from the oversight of any Congressional committee, the scrutiny of the press, or accountability to the American people.
Responsive more to profit incentives than to the public, these corporations could exercise untold, unchecked control over the lives of immigrants–legal or not, undocumented or not–not to mention American citizens.
The use of teams of private bounty hunters to do the mass deportations work of ICE and the expansion of privately operated detention centers for detainees amounts to a private corporate army with its own camps waging an undeclared war against individuals living in the United States.
Never has the danger of privatization been so serious, and so stark.
Donald Cohen
Executive Director