Outside of Philadelphia, there's an old nursing home that peaks out from behind lush trees. Instead of caring for the old, these days, it detains the young: kids who came to the United States with their parents. Inside its hallways, a little boy named Diego went from diapers to detention. When he was just one year old, Diego's mother, Wendy, decided  that life in Honduras was too dangerous for them to stay. Like people from all over the world  have done for generations, Diego and Wendy turned  to the United States for safety. If you are in the United States  and you are afraid for your life, federal law is clear  that you can ask for asylum. It does not matter where you came from  or how you got here. Diego and Wendy did just that. Within a few days, they found themselves inside that Pennsylvania immigration prison. Two among half a million people  who will be locked up every single year while the government decides if they will be allowed to stay in the United States. Instead of a fair match between a prosecutor and a defense attorney, imprisoned migrants  usually walk into court alone. It's a high-stakes legal battle that they are forced to fight  with their hands tied behind their backs. As the courts deliberate, the days pass. From your community to mine, today someone is locked up who has not been accused of any crime. Often, they haven't seen a judge or even a lawyer. And yet in most immigration prisons that I have visited as a lawyer or a researcher, the steel doors close shut with the clank of confinement. For the sake of votes, politicians claim people like Diego and Wendy  are dangerous or dishonest. For the sake of profits, private corporations  run prisons to house them. It seems unimaginable today, but we haven't always locked up migrants who are waiting for the government to decide their fate. At one time, the United States stood on the verge  of abolishing immigration prisons. "This was the sign  of an enlightened civilization," the Supreme Court wrote in 1958. We were so close, but politics and profits  pushed us in the opposite direction. With the support  of Republicans and Democrats, today we lock up men, we lock up women, and we lock up children. But in our past,  I see hope for the future. We can take clear steps toward abolishing immigration prisons. Most think of Ellis Island as the place that welcomed generations  of newcomers to the United States. It did that. But it was also an immigration prison with an ironic view  of the Statue of Liberty. By the 1950s, the Ellis Island facility needed  to be repaired, replaced or discarded. The government of the war hero turned Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, decided to shut it down. But then, starting in the late 1970s, the United States built the largest  immigration prison system in the world. Republicans and Democrats worked together, pointing to the prisons' barbed wire to uphold the law and protect you from me. When Haitians started arriving  in large numbers in the 1970s, Carter turned to detention. In the 1980s, Reagan followed by jailing Cubans and Central Americans. George H.W. Bush turned to the military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, to jail migrants. President Clinton left them there. The next President Bush  separated parents from their children. Congress balked at this, so Bush relented by building a detention site where families could be confined together. President Obama shut this down. But just a few years later,  Obama opened up two similar sites. President Trump wants more. This isn't a partisan issue. This is a profits issue. To local governments and private businesses, immigration prisons  are a financial spigot. The two largest private prison corporations in the United States, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, get about half of their money  from the federal government. With that, they hire people  in out-of-the-way locations where decent-paying jobs  are hard to come by. Down in South Texas, head north from the border, and eventually, you will catch  the sharp stench of onions filling the air. The local economy of Raymondville, that's the county seat of Willacy County, it runs on produce, on produce and on prisons. Tucked behind a state jail, the Willacy County Detention Center houses federal immigration prisoners in large canvas tents. A few years ago, this facility shut down  after inmates rebelled. And when that happened,  I was not surprised because back when I used to  represent clients there, stories of rape, harassment  and abuse were common. Eventually, the county lost a few hundred jobs. Even the Walmart shut down. But then, in the summer of 2018, when the refurbished prison  was ramping up to re-open, the county's elected officials celebrated. Why was the county so interested? It owned the prison,  and the private company just ran it. Having prisoners on the inside meant that the private company could hire guards and they could hire nurses, and it meant that the county could pay its bills. With support from Washington  down to Willacy County, it's a good time to be in the business  of locking up migrants. But we can't forget that these are people  who we're talking about: from kids who are too young  to be asked their opinions to adults with longtime ties to the United States. Diego and Wendy were stuck inside that old nursing home turned prison, waiting for the legal process  to slowly grind forward. Just one when he arrived,  Diego was three by the time he got out. Eventually, he won his legal case  to stay in the United States, but not before 650 nights passed. And yet, others are not so lucky. Kamyar Samimi had a green card and 40 years in the United States when one day ICE showed up at his door  and took him down to a private prison in suburban Denver. Within 13 days, he was dead. The government never got around  to deciding if he should be deported. In this topsy-turvy world, we feel better when we lock up kids with their mothers or when people don't meet  the same end as Mr. Samimi? Is this really the best that we can do? To move the path to a world that's free of immigration prisons does not begin by pretending  that migrants are perfect. It starts with a reality check. Immigration law tells us  that migrants are aliens, but we all know migrants are not aliens. Migrants are just people and like most people, most of the time, migrants are profoundly ordinary - ordinary people  asked to do the extraordinary, wage your final fight  to stay in this country while you are locked up far away from family or friends where lawyers are hard to come by. To fix this and move toward a world without immigration prisons, let's stop paying CoreCivic and the Geo Group to lock up migrants. And let's start paying lawyers to defend them. (Applause) Having a lawyer just means that the courts are more likely to reach a fair and a just conclusion. And when it comes to important legal questions, let's be honest, What's more American  than a fight between lawyers? (Laughter) We've done this in the past. The government  has run several pilot projects. Every time, support has proven enough  to get migrants out of prison, to keep them on top of their court dates and away from trouble. But we've never let these projects grow. Politics and profits have always stamped out the promise of freedom. We can lock up migrants, but we don't have to. Instead of hoping that barbed wire and steel doors will guide us out of the labyrinth  of immigration law, we could invest in justice. We could make sure that every migrant has a fair chance of putting their best legal case forward. Because immigration prisons  don't get us out of a problem. Immigration prisons are the problem. (Applause) They blind us to the past  when we did things differently, and they distract us from the money-making tentacles  that tie our future to the prison gates. But the thing is, liberty is too precious for any of us to lose it because politicians want votes  and private corporations want money. Thank you. (Applause)