Adding to the list of corporate motivated legislation, there is some evidence that suggests that the recent wave of restrictive immigration policy is bought and paid for by private prison businesses. The largest private prison company in the country is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The second largest is GEO Group, Inc. Between these two companies from 1999 to 2009, over $20 million was spent in lobbying for immigration policies that would result in higher rates of detention of illegal immigrants. Among those being lobbied were Senators and Representatives at the federal level as well as the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CCA also lobbied to the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior.

Immigrant detention is big business with an annual price tag of around $1.7 billion. On an average day, ICE detains as many as 33,000 illegal immigrants and since 2003, 2.5 million illegal immigrants have been detained. While focusing on quantity, these facilities have scrimped on quality with many reports surfacing of poor conditions and treatment of prisoners. In fact, a report released this year by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHL), a multinational human rights watchdog group, slammed U.S. practices regarding illegal immigrant detention citing poor conditions, lack of due process, and that U.S. detention facilities do not meet minimum internationally-recognized human rights standards. Such reports have caused these private prison firms to lose their contracts with the federal government but it’s not only the firms who are to blame. The IACHL report also criticizes ICE for acting as “judge and jailor” when it comes to illegal immigrants.

This information has come to light thanks to a report released by watchdog group Detention Watch Network (DWN). The group’s spokesperson and director of policy advocacy, Emily Tucker, commented during an interview about private prison industry’s lobbying practices, “For years, private prison firms have played a critical role in shaping public policy around immigration detention, pursuing the bottom line at the expense of basic civil rights and taxpayer dollars.” DWN also claims that these private prison firms have also even helped to write and introduce immigration legislation that would ultimately help fill their facilities. Tucker went on to say, “This data highlights deep corporate investment in the detention business, raising concerns about how the corporate profit-motive is fueling the expansion of the detention system as a whole.” DWN admits that the information they have is only “the tip of the iceberg” and have committed to researching the situation more fully.

Detention of illegal immigrants and the conditions thereof have become one of the major sticking points for advocates of comprehensive immigration reform. And data showing a clear connection between corporate profits and political legislation only fuels their movement and throws into question the true reasoning behind conservative impetus to pass ever more immigration restrictions when numerous polls—Gallup polls, New York Times polls, Washington Post polls, etc.—show that the majority of Americans agree that illegal immigrants should be offered a conditional path to citizenship.