Private equity firms now hold contracts at nearly two-thirds of the country’s ninety federally designated immigration detention facilities, according to new research shared with us — meaning opaque, unaccountable, and profit-gouging Wall Street interests are set to make hundreds of millions of dollars detaining and surveilling the country’s immigrants.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take power, with plans for mass deportations and heightened surveillance of undocumented immigrants, the private interests that make their money from immigration enforcement stand to benefit — and could help push these immigration crackdowns forward.
Private equity, which invests in for-profit companies and seeks high returns, is one of those interests. A new report released Wednesday by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog group that tracks the harms of private equity, reveals the stake the industry has in our immigration system, just as Trump threatens to expand it massively.
Researchers with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project found that vendors backed by private equity firms now hold contracts at fifty-eight federal immigration facilities — and have signed contracts to provide services to migrant shelters in cities from Chicago to New York to El Paso, Texas.
Private equity has its tentacles in nearly every industry one could imagine, from nursing homes to pensions to bowling. In all of these sectors, private equity firms follow a similar playbook, aggressively buying up private companies and pushing to sell them at a high return. But the industry’s infiltration of the US immigration system, where it is acquiring companies that provide health care and shelter services to vulnerable immigrants, as well as…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
