I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

My takeaway from this is that laws and rules don't matter if the officials on the ground are incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you.

There is a lot of unnecessary cruelty and lack of due process in this story.

I sort of disagree. There _is_ a process, which optimises for holding people as long as possible for the prison industrial complex to make money. When you privatise these kind of social services, this is what happens. This is not due to a few officials on the ground that just happened by chance to be "incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you". As the article concludes,

> The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

> Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

> The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

It's a couple things.

One is the private prison industry being incentivized to hold as many people as possible.

But there's also a bureaucracy (ICE and State) with little to no pressure to perform better for this particular population (because who cares about criminals?).

Consequently, you get an industry that's perfectly happy to warehouse people... coupled with a slow and ineffective government controlling the keys to their release.

Private detention facilities should be banned.

But the government also needs KPIs with consequences tied to them. E.g. average holding time, average response time to filing, etc. And leaders get fired / budgets cut if targets are missed.

At this point, I am not sure if we can exclude that lobbying from private prisons does not affect the way bureaucracy runs, from the stage of legislation to the point of how said legislation is executed. Thus I am not sure that these two are in truly independent.

But otherwise I agree; even in places where detention facilities are not privatised, bureaucracy can still pose a lot of issues because, as you say, "who cares about criminals", or because certain traits are overrepresented in the group of people who take up these jobs.

The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.

To wit, that no one actually cares about doing anything.

And granted, that's long been a consequence of low morale in the prison and ICE employee pool, but now it's coupled with a removal of even the least pressure from above to do the job well.

In short, I don't think "Be cruel to people" needs to be messaged from above: "We don't care about anyone you're holding" is sufficient for low-level employees to be their worst selves.