American immigration policies will prop up private prisons for the foreseeable future
Following the DOJ's decision to end use of private prisons, the privare prison industry is ramping up its lobbying. But it can take solace in the fact that current American immigration policies will prop up the industry for the forseeable future, regardless of any "pending review." As the CEO of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) said during an investor call in 2013, "ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has always said… there is always going to be strong demand regardless of what is being done at the national level as far as immigration reform."
For instance: In 2010, former KKK organizer Sen. Robert Byrd snuck an incendiary line into a larger national security bill that created an increasing detention bed quota for ICE to fulfill. Seeing how private prisons house some 62 percent of ICE's detainees—and charge the government per prisoner some $160/day—the industry direclty profits from the arbitrary quota.
Last week, DHS officials met to address record immigration detention and to scrounge up 5,000 new beds. ("They’re scraping the bottom looking for beds," an anonymous official told the Journal.) Then CCA stocks spiked after news broke that ICE had extended its contract to run the country's largest family detention center in the country. This was only weeks after ICE's advisory committee on family detention recommended that the agency end the practice entirely. Family detention centers have been referred to as "internment camps."
(Also: ICE is looking to reopen at least two DOJ private prisons that are being shut down, one of which was a subject of a lengthy exposé that found that it regularly functioned without any doctors on staff.)