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The Lawfare Podcast
Lawfare Daily: ‘Deportation, Inc.’ and the Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy
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- [00:01]
Sitariya Gandahari
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Parmit The Shah
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Parmit The Shah
The ICE director, Todd Lyons, summarized his goal for dhs, which is that he wanted the deportation system to run like Amazon prime, but with human beings. And I think that really encapsulates the really sick juncture we have now between corporate interests and immigration enforcement and detention.
- [01:12]
Tyler McBrien
It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrient, managing editor of Lawfare, with C2's deputy director of Research, Gauri Bahuvena, Detention Watch Network's Advocacy Director, Sitariya Gandahari, the American Immigration Council's Policy Director, Nene Gupta, and just feature law's Executive Director, Parmit the Shah.
- [01:32]
Nena Gupta
We will absolutely advance proposals to strengthen the accountability and oversight mechanisms that have now been gutted and to make them more effective than they've ever been. If the question is how do we get rid of these entrenched private interests, even those strengthened mechanisms aren't going to do the job.
- [01:50]
Tyler McBrien
Here today we're talking about the rise of immigration enforcement economy following the recent release of Deportation, Inc. A new video series from Situ and Lawfare. So, Gory, I want to start with you. The catalyst for this conversation, of course, is the release of a series of videos by Lawfare in Situ called Deportation the Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy. So just to kind of set the scene, I was hoping you could give us a bit of an overview of the project, its origins, what it's trying to accomplish, and. Yeah, just to sort of frame the conversation. Sure.
- [02:26]
Gauri Bahuvena
Thank you, Tyler. So this project actually began in 2023, and it was to study how the border as a concept has started to fan out away from the physical southern border and how it exists digitally, physically and politically across the United States as We entered the election cycle last year, but we realized that it was very important to focus on this boom in the economy of immigration enforcement. This is not something that didn't exist in prior administrations, but certainly, as we're seeing play out, is really exploding and moving to new heights in the current administration.
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Tyler McBrien
Yes, I want to start with this concept of the Immigration Industrial Complex, or Deportation, Inc. And just kind of get folks reactions of whether this is an apt analogy, how you think of the role of private actors in immigration enforcement and their interactions with the government. So, Nena, we'll start with you. In what ways does this analogy ring true to you? And. Yeah, how do you see the interactions between the private actors and the government and immigration enforcement? And then, of course, we'll dive down in some of these areas.
- [03:47]
Nena Gupta
Yeah, I mean, I think just at most top level, this is a system that is for profit. When we detain immigrants in the immigration detention system, we are lining the pockets of private prison companies. And any of us who have attended shareholder meetings for any of these private companies know that they are publishing actual graphs that align the increasing number of people with increasing profits. And so when we have a conversation about, you know, decreasing the size of this system or getting to a more humane place on immigration enforcement, given the current mass deportation agenda, we can't avoid the glaring barrier here, which is that there are entrenched private sector interests invested in the continuation of this system, whether it's at the border or increasingly in the interior of the United States.
- [04:49]
Tyler McBrien
Yes, Atari. I was wondering if you could speak to a bit about how we got here. What are the reasons behind the need to outsource critical functions of the immigration system to private actors? How did we arrive at this system that we have today?
- [05:06]
Sitariya Gandahari
Yeah, I mean, I guess first I just want to say I agree with what Naina said. I don't think we can ignore the role of private actors. I mean, the fact is that the vast majority, over 90% of people who are in ICE detention are in facilities that are privately run. And even the facilities that are public or that are run by local sheriffs or local law enforcement agencies, there's always a profit incentive. So I don't think we can. I don't think we can overemphasize that point. But I think we have to be careful also to not divorce that from the bigger picture on immigration policy and how that interacts with the system of mass incarceration in the U.S. really, the growth of the immigration detention system happened sort of hand in hand with the growth of the mass incarceration system, I don't think we can separate it from the military industrial complex even. I mean, I think all of these pieces that we often think about separately, the criminal punishment system and mass incarceration, foreign policy and the military industrial complex and immigration, there's a lot of overlap and a lot of connections that I think we need to be really mindful of when we're talking about any of them. And I think to your question of how did we get here, One of the first, the first private prison in the United States was for immigration detention. So in many ways, the immigration system was sort of a blueprint for the rise of private prisons in the federal criminal context. But then, of course, we've gone back and forth and shared, you know, they've shared facilities, they've recycled prisons that used to be, you know, immigration prisons, and then they've become federal prisons and back and forth constantly. So I think, number one, you know, the growth of the system really started with the private prison system and what with these companies. And it's also very tied to the history of racism in this country. I mean, the reason that there was this growing need or a growing move towards using immigration detention really came out of a desire to keep black and brown people, particularly, you know, refugees from Haiti and Cuba from entering the United States. And so that I think we, you know, we have to keep all of that in mind when, when we're talking about the growth of private prisons in the immigration context and beyond Parmita, we've.
- [07:42]
Tyler McBrien
Been talking about detention so far, and the first video in our series addresses detention. But the immigration system, of course, carries out a lot of functions in addition to detention, surveillance, interdiction, removal and deportation. I know that your focus is more on the surveillance economy. So first of all, who are the major players there? What private companies are involved in ICE contracts, particularly with regard to surveillance? And how does that aspect also. Is it victim to the same sort of revolving door and these same connections that you see in detention as well with private prisons?
- [08:22]
Parmit The Shah
Yeah, I mean, I feel like DHS is not a small federal agency.
- [08:28]
Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
And it has touched and has in some way or another, you know, 46 million people who are foreign born in the U.S. and so, you know, that is the kind of scale we're looking at. So when we talk about prisons, when we talk about incarceration, when we talk about enforcement, we are talking about enforcement and detention. Deportation at a scale that is close to, I don't know, 1/6 of our population. Right. And so I don't think you can really ignore the scale, the ambition of the corporate interests that are behind dhs. DHS has always been a cash cow. And I totally agree with Nena and Satare where they are talking about whether it's public or private, there are contractors and the contractors are banking on DHS to give them millions, sometimes billions.
- [09:26]
Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
To create the architecture that they need. And a lot of that is surveillance.
- [09:31]
Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
So surveillance is a big driver of deportations. Everything from taking pictures to taking fingerprints to taking photos of your license plate. There is a through line from how they're starting at the point of somebody walking on the street or all the way to how they may identify them as a non citizen in the way that they wanna push them to a detention center. Right. And you know, one I think stark picture that I have in my mind is, you know, when he looked at who was standing next to Trump during his inauguration, many of them, you know, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, you know, they're all working behind the scenes to build this machinery in most federal agencies. And of course it was Elon Musk who built doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is rated the government for its data, which is now being used to power deportations. And for me, it was so telling that this was the scale that they had in mind. I think the ICE director, Todd Lyons summarized his goal for dhs, which is that he wanted the deportation system to run like Amazon prime, but with human beings. And I think that really encapsulates like the really sick juncture we have now between corporate interests and immigration enforcement and detention.
- [11:00]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up that quote. I think we've all heard the often ill advised comparison of running government like a business. But it seems especially dangerous in the immigration context where there is this again, profit motive to increase the number of beds in a detention facility. Gori, I wonder if you could speak to that a bit of first of all, how C2 built this parametric tool to measure these kinds of units and how that plays a role in driving this machine and in perpetuity.
- [11:36]
Gauri Bahuvena
So the main documents that we were interested in studying were the contracts themselves between these private companies and ICE or cbp. And in the video we make the distinction between permanent facilities, which are the permanent private prisons or detention centers, and then the soft sided facilities and companies like Deployed Resources, which is named in the video, are responsible for setting up these tents and tent camps essentially. So because the unit of measurement for the permanent facilities is often how much does it cost per Detainee per bed per night. We wanted to see how that same calculation tracked in the soft sided facilities infrastructure. So we looked at the types of available tents on deployed resources on website and then mapped it onto the standards that they claimed to follow. And using some case studies based on claims that were being made by political figures in the public, about 30,000 people in Guantanamo Bay for example. And then there was a Fort Bliss plan as well. So we wanted to see whether these numbers of how many detainees lined up with the actual physical capacity of some of the structures that we were looking at. Just as a way for us to visualize these claims and these ambitions, but also what ended up happening was to demonstrate the infeasibility of these things as well.
- [13:17]
Tyler McBrien
I'm curious to go to you next, Naina, to talk about oversight and accountability here. I'm curious if the use of private actors makes oversight and accountability more difficult or easier. I don't know if the costs of relying on contractors, it makes it more difficult to track where people are being held and ultimately where they go.
- [13:42]
Nena Gupta
Yeah. So I think it's true of course, that when you are subcontracting out a carceral system, you're dealing with many more actors. And so if you actually care about accountability and oversight, you're having to deal with that many more players. But the truth is that long before the Trump administration, oversight and accountability of the US Detention system has been subpar. And that's really putting it lightly. You know, the laws on the books through the congressional appropriations process and otherwise, you know, do give Congress the ability to investigate what's happening in immigration detention facilities, to report out on that set of conditions. But it has given them very little power to actually hold the agencies and their subcontractors accountable when they're not meeting appropriate standards or they're not following the law. For years, you know, we have had reports from the Office of Inspector General, from sub agencies within DHS that underscore the endemic human rights violations across the system. Medical neglect, medical care, an obscene level of use of solitary confinement at the hands of private contractors. But those reports have really amounted to nothing. We've not seen the termination of contracts as a result of these violations. We haven't seen private actors having to face meaningful liability for those violations. And that's because our enforcement mechanisms and structure were incredibly weak even before this moment with this administration. Now, from day one, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to completely dismantle any oversight that existed in the past. You know, they're of course Refusing to allow members of Congress to conduct visits into detention facilities. They've dismantled the sub agencies that are responsible for tracking civil rights complaints and immigration detention. This is a gutting of the oversight infrastructure. But, you know, on a hopeful note, in theory, it should provide an opening going forward to re envision accountability and oversight for this system, because what we had in the past didn't work. And it opened the door for the kinds of violations that we're seeing now and that are increasingly bothering the American public, even though these violations are long standing in the system.
- [16:15]
Tyler McBrien
Yes. You mentioned moments ago that 90%, I believe, of detainees are of migrant detainees are held in private prisons. And so I want to hear your thoughts on the risks, the dangers of such a heavily privatized system, perhaps in addition to what Naina was saying of oversight and accountability, but also just conditions for detainees. What are really the pitfalls of this heavily subcontracted system?
- [16:46]
Sitariya Gandahari
Yeah, I mean, what that means is the people who are running the facilities, they're driven by profit. Their interest is making as much money as they can. That's the system. That's the way it's set up. So they, they cut corners. And, you know, again, just as Nina mentioned, this has been true for decades now. This isn't like a new Trump 2.0 thing. That's been the way that the system has been functioning for years. For decades. You know, whoever's running these facilities, they cut corners on medical, they cut corners on food. You know, often people are getting moldy food. You know, especially this year, we've been hearing countless reports that people don't even have enough food. But for years, we've heard reports that, you know, the food that people get is inedible. It's moldy. You know, there's plumbing problems and facilities. I think a lot of what we've been seeing, the construction that we've been seeing this year, it's been happening at such a rapid pace that there's, there have been so many problems with just the infrastructure or there, you know, there are facilities that have been closed for, you know, a number of years and they're being reopened, but they're, you know, the, the, again, the infrastructure is just not up to date. So, you know, people are suffering inside of facilities and really horrendous conditions. And, you know, it's been really hard to hear stories from people who are, who are in detention this year in terms of the conditions that they're experiencing. Again, they don't have blankets, they're sleeping on the floor. The food is Moldy, the plumbing problems. You know, there's one toilet for, you know, however many, you know, like dozens of people. So this is something that has been getting worse this year. So we've gone from 39,000 people in detention when the Trump administration came in this year to now over 65,000 people, which he's already broken his own record that he have 55,000 people in ICE detention during the first administration. And this has, again, this, this has looked like increasingly deteriorating conditions as these corporations and these contractors are interested in profit. And that's resulted in a shocking number of deaths. This year has been the deadliest year in ICE custody in decades. There have been 27 deaths, and that's of people who have died in custody. And that doesn't consider the fact that, you know, we don't know how many people have died once they've been released or deported because of the conditions that they have experienced inside of ICE custody. And we may never know that number.
- [19:30]
Nena Gupta
If I could just add one thing here on Satira's important point on deaths. You know, the long standing policy with DHS is that within a certain period of time, they report deaths to Congress and to the public. And in the first few months of this administration, we've seen a complete abdication of that policy. We've had to rely on members of Congress calling private prison companies, calling wardens of local facilities to demand answers on deaths of people inside, which underscores the really low point we've hit here on accountability and oversight. There's been an inability from day one to shut down facilities where death is likely. And now, even when deaths happen, they're not being reported as they've been required to be for so long.
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- [23:59]
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- [25:39]
Parmit The Shah
Yeah, I mean, what is the problem? Right. And I think, you know, maybe I might date myself when I say this, but I feel like Woody Guthrie said it the best when he's like, fascism comes along when rich people get the generals to do what they want. Want, Right. So I don't think it's much different here. You know, I think this group of tech bros, whether you're talking about Palantir's, you know, Alex Karp or whether you're talking about John Lonsdale, again, Peter Thiel, these are the people who are making up the ideas, who know how to be grifters in our surveillance economy. Right. They truly are. They are building systems that make them money and they do not care about laws.
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Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
And I say this with some hesitation because I know how laws have not protected the hundreds of thousands of people who go through immigration detention and our immigration deportation system, you know, forever. But I do think that this is a particularly lawless group of people who are looking to make money. And so when I look at products or that are being pushed out through DHS spyware products like cellebrite, which is a phone hacking system, or Paragon Solutions, which is another type of spyware, the expanding use of facial recognition systems like Clearview, AI or Mobile Fortify, which are used essentially to take pictures of people and not just take their facial scans, but create a profile that is very much of a DHS profile. Right. It doesn't really. DHS is not collecting pictures because they care about people. They are creating a profile. And what that means is like they are, you know, they have Hired companies to grab data, to collect commercial data, essentially to build a picture of a person that doesn't take account of their family, their relationships to their community, the businesses they may have set up. It is really about where have they gone, who are their friends, where do their kids go to school, when do they use their utility products in their home, whether it's their cell phone or their water.
- [28:00]
Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
What is their license plate? It is tons of commercial data that's being accumulated and it is augmenting the machinery within dhs. It is not creating limitations. That is a softer, gentler force. And I think this is not a huge billionaire who made this product, But I think SmartLink is a really good example of how an app that was created to supposedly monitor people when they were released from the cage of dhs. So they're released and able to walk around, but have to report in or be monitored through an app on their phone or called SmartLink. That that product was kind of pushed out through people who had been at datejust and then corporate actors who saw the profit motive of creating this app. Right. Which they had deployed and put hundreds of thousands of people on it. And did it stop them from making prisons? No, they kept on using prisons. And in fact, it is only added on, you know, to the mass incarceration state that DHS is just such a big part of building.
- [29:16]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, I take your point. There's definitely a certain degree of corruption and lawlessness. But on the flip side of that, you know, much of what we were looking at in the videos is perfectly lawful, and this is what we would call maybe lawful, but awful in some ways. So, Naina, earlier you were talking about this opening to create a new and more robust system of accountability. So I was hoping you could expand on that a bit of what can be done here to make sure that the profit motive for many of these companies isn't driving policy and rather that it switches back to the other way around. I was hoping you could just elaborate on that from earlier.
- [29:53]
Nena Gupta
Yeah. So look, I think we can offer policy proposals on how to rebuild a stronger accountability and oversight system, given that this is a system that right now seems incredibly entrenched with its private interests. And that accountability structure has to include, you know, independent oversight agencies that have actual enforcement power, so that when there are violations of the law or of, you know, basic human rights or ICE's own standards, there are actually actions that are taken to shut down physicians facilities. But even those reforms which would provide a significant increase in oversight of how these private companies operate Facilities would, of course, not change the underlying private entrenched interests here. And that's why it's really worth taking a step back to your question on history to remind folks that for much of the 20th century, the United States in France enforced civil immigration laws without the use of long term detention. It's quite possible to enforce a civil system of rules without incarcerating people who overwhelmingly pose no public safety threat. You know, in the 1980s, when the system exploded, as Satare mentioned, as a way to exclude Haitians, you know, one of the underlying justifications was this tired old emphasis on deterrence policy. If we detain people who are here, they are less likely to come to the United States. Well, here we are 50 years later, and we know from migration patterns that who comes and how many people come have nothing to do with our detention policy. It has to do with a whole host of other factors. And so that underlying justification has really never held. And if the idea is to really set up an immigration system that is void of entrenched private interests, then we really have to be looking to more substantive changes to immigration law that can have consequences for violation of civil immigration law, but where those consequences are not so punitive and don't involve carceral responses which are largely inappropriate for this system. And so, while at the American Immigration Council, we will absolutely advance proposals to strengthen the accountability and oversight mechanisms that have now been gutted and to make them more effective than they've ever been. If the question is, how do we get rid of these entrenched private interests, Even those strengthened mechanisms aren't going to do the job here.
- [32:42]
Sitariya Gandahari
I agree with a lot of what Nina said, and I think, you know, when we're talking about entrenched interests, I don't think that necessarily implies that, you know, the immigration detention system is driven by the private prison company's influence. I mean, there's a huge influence, like Naina said, around the immigration policy that's being pushed by, you know, elected officials, whether that's deterrence, whether that's, you know, targeting certain communities, you know, this mass deportation agenda that the current administration has. So I think we need to be careful not to overly emphasize the role of private prison companies. You know, they exist to make profit, and when they see the opportunity, they're going to exploit it. So, you know, I think strengthening oversight is not a bad thing. It can only be a good thing. But as Naina said, we really need to go after the, you know, what is our philosophy around immigration in the United States? How do we want to relate to migration that has been part of the human condition since the beginning of time. People move, and how do we want to orient ourselves towards that? And I think we really have missed the mark on that question for the last two, three decades. We need to reframe how we talk about immigration. And I think part of that is also reframing the way that immigration has captured the national conversation in a way that really isn't about immigrants and it's really not about migration. It's really about deflecting attention from other, you know, other parts of our society that really actually need the attention more. So I think we just need to take a step back and think about how we're approaching migration as the corporate world.
- [34:35]
Nena Gupta
Right.
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Parmit The Shah
And, you know, I didn't come into the surveillance work wanting to come into the surveillance work. The surveillance actually came at us through many of the work that all of us have done, including NENA and satire around sanctuary cities.
- [34:52]
Sitariya Gandahari
Right.
- [34:52]
Parmit The Shah
And what we had seen was a piercing of those policies, largely through companies that had found ways to get around them. And ICE was looking for ways to circumvent decisions that cities had made after a long deliberative process of enacting sanctuary cities. And I think when we embarked on this exploration of what is the role of these companies, who is behind them, what are they buying, what are they making? I think what we've discovered through our lawsuits and through our policy work is there's very much of a weak regulatory environment, right? And so we can talk about laws, but the regulation of these laws is bad. It's not bad. It's bad on kind of like the carceral system is also bad in the commercial sector, right? There's very weak regulation, period. Whether you're buying the technology, whether you're outsourcing the technology. People are buying products, people are buying systems without knowing what they are buying, right? So Palantir will be, which is now valued, you know, at a half a trillion dollars right at this moment, based on what it is building for our federal agencies, especially dhs. Right. And, you know, they are building systems that are full of processes and a deep understanding of how DHS works. And no concerns, with no concerns about whether it is violating laws, whether it's violating privacy laws, violating search and seizure laws, whether it's violating rules around consent at various levels of which they collect data and they use it. I think, like, this is a time where we need to also be looking at who are the players behind this. And as we think about the fights and many of Many of my colleagues around the table do this. They don't bring fights only, you know, at dhs, they bring it at the state level, they bring it to the corporations that are doing, and they also bring it to the sheriffs who are also benefiting from the money that is being paid to them through dhs. So I think it is a multi pronged strategy. All of them will tell you this. There's no one winner. But I think for us, you know, as, as just futures law, what we have seen is the real dangers that an unregulated corporate sector presents on our governments and the ways that we think about governance because it's really forcing a level of unaccountability that it is unsustainable over time.
- [37:46]
Tyler McBrien
I wanted to ask Nina where all of this is going. If, if it's a system that continues to have very little regulation, one that is due to have an enormous, even higher windfall of appropriations and money to contract out. Keeping in mind that the numbers and the goals that are being set by the Trump administration, these very, very high numbers, which it remains to be seen whether they could even carry out deportations at, at such a high level, what are the stakes here where, you know, what would a system like this look like in a year, two years into the next administration even?
- [38:26]
Nena Gupta
Yeah, so I think the short answer is that this is going to get a lot bigger and a lot worse and egregious before anything possibly could get better. You know, in July, President Trump signed the one big beautiful Bill act into law. And that gives DHS $45 billion for immigration detention to be spent through fiscal year 2029. And that is on top of the already record high 4 billion appropriated for ICE detention. And at the council, we've calculated that with this funding, ICE can potentially acquire enough detention beds via all of these contractors to house, you know, at least 135,000 people at any given time, which is more than three times the capacity of the system when the President took office and would make this system comparable to the US Federal prison system. And that is just based on the dollars alone. Now, with regards to this mass deportation agenda, we know that since spring, the White House has been advancing politically motivated daily arrest goals, requiring the agencies to arrest 3,000 non citizens per day by really any means possible. That has really been their only priority. This alongside, you know, other detrimental policy changes has meant that there is a over 2000% increase in the number of people in immigration detention who have no criminal conviction. We've seen at large arrests in American Communities increase by 600% in the first nine months of Trump in office. In other words, the makeup of people in immigration detention, the numbers of people in immigration detention, where these folks come from, you know, they will be our neighbors, longstanding community members. We can expect all of that to increase. You know, in the first place, this is an administration that has used public safety as a pretext for mass deportation, criminalizing immigrants, and fear mongering and preying upon American fears on safety to justify this system. And I think Americans in many communities are starting to wake up to the fact that there were never enough immigrants who pose an actual public safety threat to get anywhere near the numbers of what this administration is talking about. And so, as a result, with the dollars the administration has and these daily arrest goals, we are going to see more and more people stuck in this growing system. And I'll add one other point here, which is that in addition to the funding and the worsening conditions that Sitare spoke to, the administration is increasingly denying people inside immigration detention any access to immigration judges to make a case for release. This was a system where going into Trump, there were already very many people subject to mandatory detention, which meant no access to a hearing to say, hey, I don't pose a safety threat. I'm going to show up to my hearing. I should get to be back in my community. And now nearly everybody in immigration detention is being denied that right. And just to give a context to that, in the US Criminal legal system, people accused of the most heinous crimes have a right to a bail hearing. They may be denied bail, they may have to await their trial and due process while incarcerated, but they get an opportunity to make a case for release. And this is a system where we are locking up people who pose no safety threat while also denying them access to bond hearings. And so as we look ahead, you know, this, I think from all aspects will likely get worse. And the only real hope that I think we see at the council is that as Americans really feel the pain of this in a more mainstream way than they're accustomed to, that there will be an opening to make a bigger case for starting to dismantle and scale back this system.
- [42:46]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah. As we near the close here, Paramita and Satari, I'm curious at what Naina was saying right at the end there of what you see in your respective organizations as the biggest opening for reform or regulation or some kind of intervention into this system of public and private actors. Sitari, I'm curious. You first. I don't know whether it's actually attacking it from the private prison industry of non immigration detention or if it's specific to the immigration system. But yeah. So in your respective work where you see the opening, at least in the short term?
- [43:26]
Sitariya Gandahari
Yeah, I mean a couple things. I mean first I think opening or you know, where I see hope in this moment is that there are communities across the country that are coming together and pushing back and running campaigns and resisting at the local level. And I think that's really where there is the most opportunity to stop these contracts from going through in the first place or getting your local county council or your mayor or your city council to refuse to enter into these contracts. I mean, one thing that we didn't talk about is a lot of times the way that these private prison companies get the contracts in the first place is through pass throughs. So ICE will enter into an agreement with the county, let's say, and then the county will subcontract to the private prison company. So what are things that people can do right now at the local level to stop those contracts from ever coming into existence or to get their local governments to pull out of them? So I think that is a place that even with the makeup of the federal government right now, there is a lot of opportunity. The other thing that I wanted to just mention going off of what Nina was saying at the end there is that, you know, all of this, you know, that $45 billion, which was by the way, part of a larger $150 billion package that was for the detention, deportation, you know, agenda that's coming at the expense. I mean, it's not just that people are seeing the violence of the system on their, on their screens and in their communities every day, but that's actually directly impacting people's everyday lives. That came at the expense of healthcare, that came at the expense of, you know, kids having food, school lunches, that came at, you know, there's, there's a lot of other pieces of the federal budget that are suffering while we're seeing this massive investment into the detention and deportation system. So I think we really need to paint that picture clearly that this doesn't happen in a vacuum. That this is happening alongside divestment from pieces of federal government and policy that actually would make all Americans lives better. So it's actually beyond immigration, it's much more than that. And I think we really need to make that clear for people that there are these trade offs and that everyone's lives are really being jeopardized because of where elected officials are Choosing to invest our money.
- [45:54]
Tyler McBrien
And Parmita, before I go to you, I wanted to turn to Gauri quickly to just follow up on that point about where this money is going because there's some arguments that, for example, reopening an idle facility, detention facility could be an economic boon to job creation, that kind of thing. So Gori, I was wondering what you found in your research with that sort of economic stimulus argument.
- [46:21]
Gauri Bahuvena
Yeah, I think in one of the research trips a colleague here at Situ took found and this was near the GEO Group facility in Michigan, the North Lake facility, that one. It's not necessarily that the communities that are neighboring will benefit economically because of the stop and start nature of a lot of these detention sites. There's not a consistent growth of people's economic conditions. But more interestingly, what we learned through speaking to local people in these towns was that because of language requirements at these facilities, they were not even hiring people in the area and they were actually bringing in detention workers from other parts of the country who were then in turn gentrifying the neighboring towns. So I think there's a lot to be done to dispel that trope of these sites, bring economic stimulus to their communities.
- [47:28]
Tyler McBrien
And Paramita, back to you. I'm happy to give you the final word. Again, same question of whether what you see in your organization as an opening or a sign of hope. This is my feeble attempt to end on something of a high note in what has otherwise been, I think, an appropriately dour conversation. But yeah, I don't know, any opportunities for reform or regulation, especially like I said, in the short term.
- [47:52]
Parmit The Shah
Well, it's good that you ask because I started off my career after 9 11, which was the birth of DHS, and it felt very, very depressing then too. But no, I get the level of down right now. These are big dollars, these are big corporations. There's a lot of harm, very visible harm and devastating loss to families and our communities that is like in our face right now. And I think there's a level, a dangerous level of apathy we can get into if we don't think we can do anything.
- [48:27]
Sitariya Gandahari
Right.
- [48:28]
Parmit The Shah
But I do think that's their point. I think they do want us to feel helpless, they want us to feel disempowered, that there's really no way out of this labyrinth of, you know, state federal money plus local federal institutions. Right. I think that's the point. And it may feel like we don't have many levers available to us, but I think we still do have options, right? We have cities who are willing to fight, we have states who are standing up. We do have the courts, even though it's a mixed bag. So I think this is the time to lay down some groundwork. This is amazing public education that has been done by Gowrie and her team at C2 and I think this is part of a massive amount of public education done by Detention Watch Network and by the American Immigration Council. I think we need to expose what's out there and bring people to a conversation about what are the trade offs like Satori said. And we need to think more about what we are fighting for. And I think that's a conversation actually all of us are want to have.
- [49:39]
Tyler McBrien
Well, I really appreciate you all taking the time to have that conversation, even if we only were able to scratch the surface in such a just a gigantic topic with so many moving facets. So I really want to thank you all for joining me today. The Law Fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other shows including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work work@lawfaremedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Patya and our audio engineer. This episode was Ian Enright of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening.
- [50:50]
Sitariya Gandahari
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