The Justice Department’s announcement on Thursday that it would seek to end the use of private contractors to run its federal prisons was a monumental one that quickly sent private prison stocks plunging and drew praise from dozens of human and civil rights groups that for years had been denouncing abuse and neglect in private facilities.

In a memo explaining the decision, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote that private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources,” “do not save substantially on costs,” and “do not maintain the same level of safety and security” as facilities operated by the Bureau of Prisons.

But as the criminal justice community began to take stock of the news, many also expressed hopes that the DOJ would not be the only government agency to cut ties with the private companies, which also operate state prisons and immigration detention centers.

In particular, advocates directly called on the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which is responsible for holding a growing number of detainees with pending immigration cases or awaiting deportation — to end its multimillion-dollar relationship with the private corrections industry.

A spokesperson for ICE did not specifically comment on the impact of the Justice Department’s announcement on its own relationship with private prison companies, noting that “ICE detainees are housed in a variety of facilities across the United States, including but not limited to ICE-owned-and-operated facilities; local, county, or state facilities contracted through Intergovernmental Service Agreements; and contractor-owned-and-operated facilities.”

The spokesperson added that the agency “remains committed to providing a safe and humane environment for all those in its custody” and “provides several levels of oversight in order to ensure that detainees in ICE custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments and under appropriate conditions of confinement.”

While the Justice Department’s decision is set to impact 13 privately run federal prisons and some 22,660 prisoners, the potential impact of a similar decision by ICE would be considerably more significant for the agency. ICE did not provide the number of detainees it oversees, but while the immigration detention population fluctuates and is hard to pin down, it had jumped to over 32,000 people in 2014, a 47 percent increase over the prior decade. Immigration advocates say that growth is both unjustified by public safety needs and sets the stage for neglect and abuse.

“As of today, the Bureau of Prisons’ two-decades experiment with private prisons is finally beginning to come to an end,” David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, told The Intercept, calling the decision “historic.” “We hope that ICE and the states will follow the lead of the Justice Department.”

Grace Meng, a Human Rights Watch senior researcher focusing on immigration issues, called the DOJ’s announcement “incredibly exciting news.” “This should prompt Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop their use of private immigration detention facilities, run by the same companies,” she added, while also noting that “focus on private companies shouldn’t remove scrutiny from county jails and other ICE facilities that are also rife with problems.”

States have traditionally taken the federal Bureau of Prisons as a model for best practices, but for ICE, severing ties would be a logistical feat of immense proportions. The exact percentage of immigrants in private detention centers isn’t easy to calculate because ICE technically contracts with local governments for many of them, and those counties then contract with the private companies — a decentralized approach to the privatization of detention that has also made these facilities harder to monitor.

But more than half, and by some estimates, as many as 62 percent of ICE detainees are living in privately run facilities, where unsafe and abusive conditions have been amply documented. By comparison, the federal prison population in privately run facilities never exceeded 16 percent and the state prison population in such facilities is around 6 percent.

“In terms of percentage, ICE is the agency that has the biggest share of its prisoners and detainees in private prisons,” said Fathi, also noting that while the federal prison population has decreased quite significantly in recent years, “the same is not true of the ICE detainee population.”

“It’s definitely going to be harder for them,” he said.

Hard or not, corrections operators are under obligation to guarantee a number of protections, regardless of law enforcement needs, Meng noted.

“The assumption that ICE can’t do this is completely false, because the fact that the detention system is as large as it is now has not been historically true,” she said. “There’s an inflated sense of how many people actually need to be in detention at any given time. What we have seen is there is a huge number of people who should not be there at all: children, families, people who are not a current threat to public safety, who have really strong claims to release.”

Details on the exact cost of privately run immigration detention are also opaque, but as immigration detention spending as a whole skyrocketed from $700 million in 2005 to more than $2 billion today, so did revenues for the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, by far the two largest private companies operating immigration detention facilities.

According to a report released last year by the Center for American Progress, federal contracts, including those from the Bureau of Prisons and ICE, jumped from 39 percent of CCA’s total revenues in 2005 to 44 percent — $724.2 million — in 2014. That year, ICE contracts alone made up 13 percent of CCA’s revenue — $221 million. Similarly, federal contracts rose from 27 percent of the GEO Group’s revenues in 2005, to 42 percent in 2014, with ICE accounting for 15.6 percent of the pie.

Just days ago, ICE signed a new four-year, $1 billion contract with CCA to house Central American asylum seekers in Texas.

The GEO Group and CCA did not immediately respond to questions about the impact of the DOJ’s decision on their other government contracts.

But as they are slated to lose millions and wield significant lobbying power, it’s unlikely they’ll go without a fight.

“Their stock is dropping like a stone. I’m sure they’re not happy and I’m sure they’ll complain they’re being unfairly treated, but the fact is, there is abundant evidence that private prisons are not as safe and not as secure and the services they provide to prisoners are inferior,” Fathi said. “Certainly the government has every right to decide that their services are no longer needed.”

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