Private Prison Giant Hired ICE Detention Chief
Just days before the 2024 presidential election, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official left to take a senior job at The GEO Group, a private prison company and the agency’s top contractor, according to a federal ethics document obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
The move by Daniel A. Bible, ICE’s top career official in charge of detaining undocumented immigrants, comes amid mass deportation plans by the incoming Trump administration that could promise soaring profits for GEO Group. It’s one of many hires the company has made from ICE’s senior ranks.
Bible’s time at ICE included working closely with GEO Group. He spent four years running ICE’s field office in San Antonio, Texas, from 2016 to 2020 where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he oversaw five detention facilities and two family residential centers holding over 7,000 people. A law review article published by Washington University School of Law found high rates of arrests, removals, and detention of noncitizens without convictions or who were deemed as “no threat” by the San Antonio field office compared to other ICE field offices during fiscal year 2019, when Bible was in charge. “These disparities suggest that field offices may be applying their own priorities or discretionary standards,” stated the study authored by Fatma Marouf, a Texas A&M University law school professor.
During Bible’s tenure at ICE, facilities he oversaw — including those run by GEO Group — were among those to face allegations of sexual abuse, medical neglect, and inhumane treatment of people in detention. In 2018, a toddler died after becoming ill at one of the family detention facilities overseen by Bible. (That facility was run by CoreCivic, another private prison and detention company. Although the practice of detaining families was ended under President Biden, the Trump administration’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan, said that family detention centers like those in Texas could return with the new administration.)
https://www.pogo.org/investigations/private-prison-giant-hired-ice-detention-chief
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