John Oliver exposes the dirty secret behind ICE detentions
Sunday’s focus of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” was the (big) business of our immigration detention systems. The terror unleashed by President Donald Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparatus has made an already problematic immigration system even worse, as people who are dependent on our broken immigration laws find themselves dragged into detention.
Oliver breaks down the main reason why the unjust system has continued to thrive: the big business of private prisons, which houses more than 90% of ICE’s undocumented detentions. Private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic have watched their stocks soar since Trump won the election.
“I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years,” CEO Damon Hininger boasts in one clip. “And this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company.”
“Look, as a general rule, if something happens that causes a private prison company to get really excited, that thing was bad,” Oliver remarks. “If you ever come home and your spouse tells you, honey, I did something today and the Geo Group is super excited about it, you are in for a relationship-altering conversation.”
ICE’s website points out that detention is supposed to be “non-punitive,” a claim Oliver jokes is like saying, “that the ocean is not wet or that the ‘Wicked’ movie wasn’t 30 minutes too long. It is a bold assertion, sharply undercut by empirical evidence.”
The GEO Group is fighting in court to avoid paying minimum wage to the detainees being forced to work under threat of solitary confinement or the withholding of food. Oliver plays audio of an exchange between a GEO Group lawyer and the judge, where the judge characterized the private prison’s argument about detainees as the same as slavery.
“When a judge is likening your client’s practices to slavery, that’s generally a pretty bad sign for your case,” Oliver says. “There really shouldn’t even be a verdict at that point. A trapdoor should just open up beneath you while they pull the next case in.”
And who is being considered for detention is also problematic. At one of her first White House briefings, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave a grotesquely wrong-headed statement that has subsequently been parroted by ICE Barbie herself, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem: any undocumented person is a criminal. “I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are,” Leavitt said.
“Simply being undocumented is a civil violation, not a criminal one,” Oliver points out of Leavitt. “That is an important distinction that her boss should frankly understand, given that he has committed both.”