The United States of America, Inc.

If there’s any doubt about how private prisons hurt ordinary people, look no further than the story of Jasmine Mooney—a Canadian citizen with a U.S. work visa who was swept into a Kafkaesque nightmare. After trying to re-enter the country to continue her legally authorized job, Mooney was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in San Diego. Despite having a valid visa and no criminal record, she was stripped of her belongings, denied legal counsel, and moved through a series of freezing detention centers—without ever being charged with a crime.

Under California law, criminal detainees must be charged or released within 48 hours. But because immigration detention is classified as a civil matter under federal jurisdiction, those protections don’t apply. Whether by oversight or design, this loophole allows ICE to detain individuals for indefinite periods—essentially circumventing due process. Perhaps to avoid public scrutiny or legal exposure, Mooney was moved from California to a facility in Arizona. Her two-week ordeal felt less like bureaucratic mishandling and more like legalized kidnapping and mental torture.

Stepping back from Mooney’s case, a larger and more disturbing picture emerges: the privatization of America’s detention system. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order directing the Department of Justice to phase out its contracts with private prisons. Many viewed this as a win for civil liberties. But the order contained a glaring loophole—it didn’t apply to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement and detention. And business for private industries associated with DHS and ICE  has been booming ever since.

In fact, prior to the executive order, the two largest private prison companies—GEO Group and CoreCivic—were already making about a third of their revenue from contracts with ICE. As their non-ICE revenue declined, they doubled down on lobbying efforts to expand immigration detention. Back in 2020, GEO Group alone secured a $2.2 billion, five-year contract with DHS for electronic monitoring of immigrants, further entrenching its role in the system. More recently, it secured a 15-year fixed-price contract to run detention facilities, which, over this span of time, will net the company approximately $1 billion. If there's money to be made in the illegal immigration industry, you'll find plenty of billionaires and corporations lining up at the feeding trough.

Meanwhile, key lawmakers who received generous contributions from the private prison industry pushed for increased border security and detention funding. Then-Senator Marco Rubio, the industry’s top recipient in the 2022 election cycle, joined others in threatening to block the federal budget unless it included more money for border enforcement. While many Republicans were loudly decrying the so-called “Biden Border Crisis,” behind the scenes they were taking campaign money from the very companies profiting off that crisis.

The result? People like Jasmine Mooney get swept into a web of private companies, breaking local and state detainment norms and violating constitutional rights with impunity. Yes—non-citizens are also protected under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to due process.

Consider this: If those rights can be ignored for some, they can be ignored for anyone. When the government outsources justice to for-profit industries, accountability disappears—and the line between civil and criminal detention begins to blur.

Mooney’s case is a warning shot. Constitutional protections only matter if we enforce them. And if we allow those protections to be weakened for immigrants or visa holders, we open the door to weakening them for citizens as well. Like a dam breaking open, it starts with a single crack and ends with a flood that sweeps us all away.

As billionaires and corporations privatize more of our government, we inch closer to becoming the United States of America, Inc. Jasmine Mooney’s story may be an extreme example for now, but it’s not an isolated one. When moving through the detention systems, she met many others whose stories we’ll never hear. They are invisible. Consider this a preview of upcoming attractions, where people, like the recent story of Mahmoud Kalill, disappear into the system, perhaps never to be heard from again.

It’s happening here, folks. It’s happening right now.

So let’s act: Flood the phone lines of your state and federal legislators. Write letters to the editor. March in the streets. Because our corporate-bought representatives are not going to save us, it’s up to us.

This is a critical time in our nation, and history is watching. It will judge us on what we do during this transitional time in our nation’s story. Just as generations before us fought for what we have, it is now our turn to carry forward the flag of freedom and democracy. Because if we don’t, nobody else will.

This is our time. This is our fight.