On his campaign website, then-candidate Joe Biden vowed to “end for-profit detention centers,” asserting tendentiously that “no business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence.”
“For-profit” in this context is a pejorative used to describe privately run detention facilities, and such assertions elide many key facts — including that federal law requires certain migrants be detained and that these private facilities must comply with the same detention standards that federal facilities are expected to meet and do so in a cost-effective manner — in substituting base emotion for reason.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is the cornerstone of our nation’s immigration laws. It mandates — in no uncertain terms — that migrants who are stopped entering the United States illegally or without proper documents are subject to detention from the moment they are encountered until they are either granted immigration relief or removed.
