14. Detention of Undocumented Migrants: From Reagan’s Neoliberal, Money-Led Legacy to a More Humanistic Approach

Since the Reagan era and the influence of the neoliberal ideology finance has never ceased to take precedence over politics in the United States. Accordingly, the neoliberal solution to the presence of undocumented migrants was to promote the construction of private prisons for this population. Groups like CoreCivic and the GEO financed by banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America or Fargo Wells and pension funds were recipients of the majority of the contracts of these penitentiary centers. As a result, these groups have supported the development of private detention centers by encouraging the enactment of stricter laws against migrants. In 2017, they contributed to the election of Trump. This shaped Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. It is the global opposition to Trump which has fostered and reactivated both the judicial activism of some lawyers and the shareholder activism of pension funds. Hence, the neoliberal vision, which originally animated the creation of these detention centers, has evolved over time to give way to a more humanistic view of the prison policy of migrants. In this new perspective, public opinion and various activist movements increasingly influence major financial groups. They are less prone to impose their accounting views on political leaders.