Two senior White House officials sidestepped questions Thursday about whether President Biden would direct the Department of Homeland Security to phase out its use of privately run immigration detention facilities, which was a campaign pledge.
“We’re not going to get ahead of the DHS decision-making process,” press secretary Jen Psaki said, pointing to a separate immigration order in which Biden called for a “review” of asylum programs and measures.
Biden issued an executive order last month calling on the Department of Justice to cease new contracts with private prisons but did not extend his directive to the facilities operating under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where most illegal immigrants are held.
“He has spoken about his concern about these facilities in the past,” but action “is under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security to make recommendations to the president of the United States,” she said.
Biden “put the power in the hands of” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to “determine what the path forward is,” she added.
Earlier in the briefing, national security adviser Jake Sullivan referred a reporter to Mayorkas’s department when asked about extending Biden’s private prison order to DHS facilities.
Biden, on the campaign trail, said that, if elected, he would “make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”
At the time, White House Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice said the administration did not have plans to extend the new measure beyond the Justice Department, a move that Biden called a “first step” later that day.
The Justice Department, via its Federal Bureau of Prisons, contracts with roughly a dozen private facilities.
