Biglaw Firm Kindly Asks You To Stop Pointing Out That Their Client Cages Children
Sometimes, discretion is the better part of valor.
While lawyers, from the ranks of Biglaw to solo practitioners, line up to protect the rights of families separated at the border by the opportunistic gang of hooligans who’ve ensconced themselves in the White House, one Biglaw firm is out there making the world safe for the profiteers making a fortune off institutionalized racial animus. And if you’re wondering which firm’s staked its good name on aiding America’s private prison companies as they come under increasing scrutiny for their history of abuses, that would be our friends over at Holland & Knight.
Yes, apparently on the eve of on-campus interviewing, Holland & Knight decided the right move for their business was carving out the Make Biglaw Great Again slice of the market by backing up private prison company GEO Group, which just happens to be ICE’s biggest contractor.
On the one hand, everyone deserves counsel willing to zealously defend their interests. On the other hand, part of zealousness is protecting your client from making a complete ass of themselves on a national stage. The sort of assification that follows sending laughable cease and desist letters to activist groups for reporting on the company’s unpleasant track record.
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In a letter sent last week to Miami’s Dream Defenders, Holland & Knight partner Carolyn Short demanded the group stop inciting protests of GEO Group facilities and remove a number of “false and defamatory” statements from their website and social media. Specifically:
The false and defamatory statements in Dream Defenders’ publications include:
* Blatantly false allegations that GEO “separates” families;
* Blatantly false allegations that GEO “cages” children;
* Blatantly false allegations that GEO “puts Black, Latino and poor White people into jail;” and
* Blatantly false accusations that GEO asserts improper influence over the United States political system and an incorrect publication of a list of individuals to whom GEO supposedly made political contributions.
Except… GEO Group does every one of these things. Now, to be fair, the company can certainly make a semantic case that they don’t, but defamation claims don’t tend to favor hypertechnicalities.
Of course, GEO Group only detains people at the behest of the government. No one reads the Dream Defenders and thinks GEO Group is unilaterally kidnapping people across the country. But the problem with acting as an agent is, you know, becoming an agent. You can’t really say you’re not a participant in the scheme anymore and at the point that GEO is the one that physically puts kids in cages this becomes entirely fair criticism.
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As for GEO Group’s lobbying efforts, which are substantial, the company maintains that it doesn’t advocate for specific policies that increase needless incarceration, it only pushes the “benefits” of a public-private partnership. Unfortunately, this requires an astonishing level of naivete to swallow. That the lobbyists never tell a legislator “increase penalties” has little impact on the level of influence the company has in increasing incarceration by poisoning its “private-public partnership” agreements with provisions requiring governments to increase enrollment lest they face financial penalties.
Everything about this letter is ill-advised. It’s not just the flimsy outline of a defamation claim, but the fact that this is just an engraved invitation for activists to tee-off on GEO Group’s tortured reasoning to create a public relations nightmare. I mean, the client runs private prisons, not ice cream stores! Most Americans are unaware that private prisons even exist, let alone the names of these companies. They don’t bank on a glowing public profile, they just need to keep their head down and hope no one catches on.
But now Holland & Knight’s made this a story and Dream Defenders got the opportunity to mock GEO Group with a widespread audience:
It isn’t only immigrant children and their families who are at risk. You’ve profited off of the incarceration of Black, Latino, and poor white youth in the criminal justice system for years. A federal court found that your operation of a youth prison in Mississippi “allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate” and placed youth at “substantial ongoing risk.”
We guess you would prefer us to call your operations “academies,” “treatment centers,” “leadership development programs,” “residential facilities”, “family detention centers” or one of the many other euphemisms you list on your website? We’ll stick with the truth. You are caging children.
The whole letter, and the linked evidence it provides (links don’t appear to be working in the version on the next page, sorry), is damning. And it would have never cropped up to news outlets but for this boneheaded strategy of threatening protestors who are always struggling just to be heard above the noise of complacency.
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Great job, Holland & Knight.
(Check out both letters on the next page.)
ICE’s Biggest Private-Prison Contractor Threatens to Sue Florida Civil-Rights Activists [Miami New Times]
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
