Data shows President Joe Biden has backtracked on his pledge to phase out the use of for-profit, private detention centers for migrants.

Biden issued an executive order shortly after taking office in 2021 that curbed the use of private contractors by the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons. He has not issued a similar ruling covering the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit, which oversees immigration detention facilities.

Since then, the  numbers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement-detained immigrants in the U.S. has risen as has private prison companies' revenue, an August 2023 American Civil Liberties Union analysis shows.

In the Biden administration's first two years, according to that report, about 79% of people Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained were held in private detention facilities — little changed from Donald Trump's first administration. By July 2023, that number increased to more than 90%.

"The evidence is quite clear that President Biden has failed to fulfill his campaign promise and in fact has back-tracked in terms of the use of immigration detention," Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's National Prison Project and lead author of the report, told Time magazine. "The number of people detained in ICE detention has expanded rapidly under the Biden administration." 

Since Biden entered office, the number of people held in immigration custody has more than doubled from 14,195 on Jan. 22, 2021, to 38,863 on Nov. 3, 2024, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research institution at Syracuse University that collects and analyzes federal immigration data.

A big part of the issue is how intertwined the private prison industry is with migrant detention, reports show. For-profit companies own many Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions centers.

For example, in 2022, The GEO Group, which is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, and is one of the U.S.' biggest private prison companies, — made more than $1 billion in revenue from Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts, about 44% of its total revenue. 

Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank, said these trends must be considered in context.

"We have experienced a historic influx of inadmissible migrants," she said, "and the Biden administration has been under great political pressure, including from Congress, to maximize ICE's detention capacity." 

Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to hold a daily average of 34,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for fiscal year 2023, and $3.4 billion to hold a daily average of 41,500 noncitizens for fiscal year 2024. 

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.

Biden has not phased out the use of for-profit detention centers for migrants. Data shows that more migrants are housed in private prisons now than when he took office.

We rate this Promise Broken.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to phase out the use of private companies to run detention centers for migrants, saying that "no business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence."

Biden did issue an executive order a few days after taking office that curbed the use of private contractors by the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons, which houses people enmeshed in the criminal justice system. (We separately rated this promise In the Works.) 

However, Biden did not issue a similar ruling covering the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the unit within the department that oversees immigration detention facilities. 

This means that migrants continue to be housed in private facilities.

"As of now, it appears that the majority of ICE detainees are being held in privately run facilities," said Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, citing estimates from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director of the justice program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, agreed that any action Biden has taken on private prisons has not been matched by similar change to migrant detention centers. 

"The administration has done nothing to reduce Homeland Security's reliance on private firms," Eisen said.

In fact, there's evidence that some private facilities that have been emptied of federal inmates under Biden's order are now being used as migrant detention centers.

One example is the Moshannon Valley Correctional Center in Philipsburg, Pa., which has been operated by GEO Group, a private prison company. The company's contract with the Bureau of Prisons ended in March 2021 as a result of Biden's order. However, the company signed a contract with ICE to house migrants instead.

"These companies are basically playing an end run around the executive order," Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, told CNN. 

The White House told PolitiFact that Biden "continues to support moving away from the use of private detention facilities in our immigration system" but that decisions would emerge from the Department of Homeland Security.

In all, Biden has moved towards ending private prisons but has so far declined to issue a similar order for migrant detention centers. We rate the promise Stalled.