Article 9: No arbitrary arrest, detention or exile
Necessary
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Since 2009, Congress has required Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep roughly 34,000 detention beds filled, a rule with no parallel in any other area of federal law enforcement. CoreCivic and GEO Group, which together run most privately operated ICE beds, has lobbied the appropriations subcommittee that sets that number, while GEO Group lobbied more broadly on immigration detention, according to research from the American Immigration Council and In the Public Interest. Since the quota exists independent of how many people actually need to be detained, legal scholars describe the resulting system as arbitrary. Inside the facilities, a 2023 federal inspection of CoreCivic's Stewart Detention Center found detainees wrongly disciplined and only half of medical requests answered. Catholic investors won an 88% vote in 2019 pressing GEO Group for independent human rights verification; in 2024, GEO simply refused to let a similar vote happen. Detention authority itself remains with government, so owners voting their values remove an obstacle nothing else removes rather than delivering the outcome on their own.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
CoreCivic and GEO Group together operate roughly seven in ten privately run U.S. immigration detention beds and control custody, classification and release-recommendation practices day to day. But the underlying legal authority to detain, including for how long and under what review, is set by Congress, DHS and the courts. Government action therefore remains necessary alongside corporate practice.
CoreCivic lobbied the appropriations subcommittee that sets the detention bed quota; GEO Group's lobbying on immigration detention was broader and not shown to target that subcommittee. Corporate political activity narrows the question rather than deciding it.
2 and 1, higher of the two, gives Necessary
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Private Prison Industry Lobbies for Detention of Immigrants, American Immigration Council, 2015
- Payoff: How Congress Ensures Private Prison Profit with an Immigrant Detention Quota, In the Public Interest, 2015
- Results of an Unannounced Inspection of ICE's Stewart Detention Center, DHS Office of Inspector General, 2023-07-27
- Priests Say ICE Contractor GEO Rejected Vote on Human Rights Review, Sojourners, 2025
- Investors say GEO Group is ill-prepared to guard against human rights risks, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2019
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Led shareholder resolutions at GEO Group in 2019 (passed 88%) and 2024 (blocked by the company) seeking independent verification of human rights performance in detention operations.
Priests Say ICE Contractor GEO Rejected Vote on Human Rights Review, Sojourners, 2025
Co-filed the 2019 GEO Group shareholder resolution on independently verified human rights performance metrics.
Filed 2018/2019 shareholder resolutions at both CoreCivic and GEO Group asking them to adopt policies against housing children separated from their parents.
Shareholders Take A Stand Against Private Prisons, Forbes, 2019-03-11
1 campaign on record
Adopt a policy prohibiting the company from housing immigrant children who have been separated from their parents, or parents separated from their children, by December 31, 2019.
Result: Kept off the ballot. CoreCivic asked the SEC for permission to exclude the resolution, arguing it was vague, misleading, impossible to implement and already substantially complied with, and no stockholder proposal reached a vote: the 2019 proxy statement listed only the directors, the auditor and the say-on-pay vote, and the 8-K for the May 16, 2019 annual meeting reports the same three.
we found no documented change in CoreCivic's family-detention policy tied to this resolution in the sources reviewed. The company said it did not then house immigrant children separated from their parents and had no plans to, but resisted being held to a policy saying so.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.