Immigration debates often begin with a demand for tougher enforcement or a promise to close detention centers. Both arguments miss a prior institutional question: when a government confines a person to carry out a lawful immigration decision, who should actually run the place where that person loses liberty? Integrazione o ReImmigrazione, a reform framework developed in Italy, gives a definite answer without abandoning immigration enforcement. It treats integration as the principal objective of migration policy, and an individualized, legally permissible return as one possible result when the conditions of lawful residence are not met. Where detention is genuinely needed to execute a return decision, the framework calls for direct public management rather than routine contracting out. This is not an appeal to abolish enforcement; it is a demand to identify the institution answerable for using coercive power.
The distinction matters because a government can retain formal legal authority while handing the daily experience of confinement to a chain of contractors. Contracts may specify staffing ratios, medical provisions and inspection rights. Yet they do not change the underlying fact that the person being held is subject to public authority, not voluntarily purchasing a service. A failure of food provision or medical access can be described as a vendor’s contractual breach; for the confined person it is also a failure in the exercise of state power. The original reform’s eighth component therefore asks for detention centers to be operated directly and exclusively by public personnel and institutions, with clear lines of administrative responsibility. This precise position is stated in the October 10, 2026, conference address; it is a proposed change to Italian practice, not a description of current American or Italian law.
Why should American readers care about a proposal for Italy’s Centri di permanenza per i rimpatri, or return detention centers? Because the United States offers a particularly revealing test of the difference between exercising public power and supervising somebody else who exercises it day to day. On November 5, 2026, the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that ICE had added more than forty facilities holding people for over seventy-two hours between April 2025 and April 2026. The average daily detained population increased by more than fifty percent, reaching 61,817 over that period. At the same time, inspection arrangements changed: some inspections became less frequent, certain oversight bodies stopped conducting them, and self-inspections received greater emphasis. GAO did not conclude that every facility was unsafe or that public ownership alone would solve the problem. It found that ICE had not adequately assessed what those changes meant for its ability to identify deficiencies.
That finding supplies the new argument. The concern is not simply whether a private operator is competent. It is what happens when the government rapidly increases its use of detention while becoming less able to establish, with independent evidence, how detention is being administered. An institution can be perfectly clear about whom it intends to remove yet insufficiently clear about the conditions under which it holds people while pursuing that outcome. Oversight of confinement cannot be treated as an optional quality-control service tacked onto procurement. The GAO’s May 21, 2025, review had already identified weaknesses in the way DHS evaluated its inspection programs. The November 2026 report adds a sharper tension: capacity expanded while the architecture for observing its performance was being changed, without the evidence needed to judge the consequences. This does not prove that contracting caused the oversight changes; it reveals why legal accountability has to be examined separately from contracting efficiency.
The point is also economic, though it cannot be reduced to a claim that public operation is invariably cheaper. A September 29, 2026, Department of Homeland Security inspector general audit reported that ICE did not consistently plan, procure and monitor detention space contracts and agreements covering fiscal years 2020 through 2023 in accordance with applicable requirements. The agreements examined were worth almost ten billion dollars. That was a finding about contract management, not a finding that every dollar was wasted or that all contractors acted improperly. But it makes a crucial distinction visible: the public remains financially and politically responsible for coercion even when performance obligations are distributed across private agreements. An earlier Italian discussion concentrated on medical independence within detention facilities. The newer American evidence shifts the question from particular services to whether the state has retained a verifiable chain of command and inspection over confinement as a whole.
A serious objection deserves more than a slogan. Public agencies may lack the staff or infrastructure to expand capacity quickly; specialized contractors can offer operational experience, and publicly administered institutions can commit abuses or conceal failures of their own. Removing private operators does not manufacture professionalism, transparent records or independent scrutiny. Nor can a foreign reform be transplanted into the American federal system as though its legal structure were identical to Italy’s. These are reasons to evaluate the trade-offs and design the transition carefully, not reasons to confuse the contract with the constitutional responsibility. A public-management model would need a realistic staffing and budget plan, separate clinical judgment from immigration decisions, publish operational standards and expose administrators to genuine outside inspection. The proposed public monopoly over day-to-day detention management is thus one institutional answer to an accountability problem; it is not itself proof of better outcomes.
There is an additional boundary that any credible reform must protect. Under Integrazione o ReImmigrazione, detention is not punishment for cultural difference, dissent, unemployment or a supposedly insufficient attachment to national identity. The model distinguishes individualized residence decisions from identity-based programs of mass removal. A return must have a lawful basis and remain subject to the applicable protections; detention must be necessary for its legally defined purpose, bounded in time and reviewable by a judge where the law requires. Public personnel cannot substitute for independent courts, and public facilities cannot turn an otherwise unlawful confinement into a lawful one. These limits matter because enforcing immigration decisions and preserving the authority of law are not competing national projects. A government that can document, explain and defend each exercise of coercion is exercising sovereignty in a more meaningful sense than one that merely multiplies detention beds.
The central policy choice is therefore not whether a state may ever detain a person pending a lawful return. It is whether a state that claims the power to detain is prepared to administer that power openly, take responsibility for its costs and failures, and permit independent verification. Italy’s proposed public operation of return centers is one way of answering yes. The American audit of November 5 supplies a new and concrete reason to take the question seriously: when capacity grows faster than demonstrable oversight, the number of facilities is no longer an adequate measure of effective governance. Immigration policy must ultimately assess what happens after entry, how genuine integration is achieved and which lawful decisions can be carried out. Where confinement is used, the state must remain more than the purchaser of a detention service: it must be the institution publicly answerable for the loss of liberty it orders.
Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Attorney admitted to practice before the Italian Court of Cassation
Registered in the Italian Chamber of Deputies’ Register of Interest Representatives in immigration matters
Registered lobbyist in the European Union Transparency Register No. 280782895721-36, in migration and asylum matters
ORCID: 0009-0004-7030-0428
Article prepared with the assistance of AI tools, under the author’s direction, review and editorial responsibility.
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