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Scholars have well-established the socio-political and legal history of immigrant detention as a form of racialized social control in the United States. In recent years, private prison companies have benefited financially from this system, amassing sizeable profits in spite of vast criticisms and concerns. For this project, we focus on how private immigration detention—as a modern-day form of racialized social control—is normalized. Using the theoretical concept of controlling images, we examine how private prison companies frame the people they detain. Results from our analysis of 143 press releases indicate that private prisons rarely talk about the people they detain. Instead, the companies make vague and indirect references using inanimate objects which dehumanizes them. When the companies do reference migrants, they often characterize them as wards of the state, and in doing so, private prison companies are infantilizing people in lockup in subtle ways. Companies also engage in a significant amount of rhetoric that champions their organizations as they bolster their business amidst scandals and allegations. We conclude that these controlling images, while appearing race neutral, are quite effective in contributing to the invisibility of these groups and maintenance of the status quo. These actions further their exploitable quality by reproducing the oppression of racial others and simultaneously function to legitimize the business practices of private prison companies. 

Past research shows that crises reveal the sensitive spots of established ideologies and practices, thereby providing opportunities for social change. We investigated immigration control amid the pandemic crisis, focusing on potential openings for both challengers and proponents of immigration detention. We asked: How have these groups responded to the pandemic crisis? Have they called for transformative change? We analyzed an original data set of primary content derived from immigrant advocates and stakeholders of the immigration detention industry. We found as the pandemic ravaged the world, it did not appear to result in significant cracks in the industry, as evidenced by the consistency of narratives dating back to pre-pandemic times. The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) criticisms of inhumane conditions in immigration detention resembled those from its pre-pandemic advocacy. Private prison companies, including CoreCivic and GEO Group, emphasized their roles as ordinary businesses rather than detention managers during the pandemic, just as they had before the crisis. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), however, manufactured an alternative storyline, emphasizing “COVID fraud” as the real threat to the “Homeland.” Although it did not call for radical change, it radically shifted its rhetoric in response to the pandemic. We discuss how these organizations’ indifference towards structural racism contributes to racial apathy and how the obliviousness and irresponsibility of industry stakeholders resembles white ignorance. 

Despite several widely covered scandals involving the role of for-profit corporations in administering immigration policy, the privatization of immigration control continues apace with the criminalization of immigration. How does this practice sustain its legitimacy among the public amid so much controversy? Recent studies on the criminalization of immigration suggest that supporters would explicitly vilify immigrants to defend the privatization of immigration control. Research on racialized social control, on the other hand, implies that proponents would avoid explicit racism and vilification and instead rely on subtler narratives to validate the practice. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of over 600 frames derived from nearly 200 news media articles spanning over 20 years, we find that journalists and their sources rarely vilify immigrants to justify the privatization of immigration control. Instead, they frame the privatization of immigration detention as a normal component of population management and an integral part of the U.S. economy through what we call the apathy strategy—a pattern of void in which not only the systematic oppression of immigrants is underplayed, immigrant themselves also become invisible.