McKinsey Proposes 'Detention Savings Opportunities': Cuts to Food, Medical Care, and Guard Supervision for Migrants

McKinsey consultants propose controversial ‘detention savings opportunities’ to ICE that include reducing spending on food for migrants, medical care, and supervision of detainees. An internal ICE email dated March 30, 2017 documents that McKinsey is ’looking for ways to cut or reduce standards because they are too costly,’ albeit ‘without sacrificing quality, safety and mission.’ The money-saving recommendations shock and disturb some career ICE staff members, who raise concerns that the proposals prioritize cost-cutting over human welfare.

In what one former ICE official describes as ‘heated meetings’ with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members question whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justifies the potential human cost. Three people who worked on the project report that McKinsey consultants seem focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations—activities whose success can be measured in numbers—with little acknowledgment that these policies affect thousands of human beings.

The McKinsey proposals trouble agency staffers to such an extent that several of the most extreme recommendations—including funding cuts for food, medical care and facility maintenance—are never implemented. Internal project emails point to cutbacks in guard staffing as the source of most actual cost savings that are implemented. McKinsey consultants become so driven to save money that they sometimes ignore and even complain to agency managers about ICE staffers who object that McKinsey’s cost-cutting proposals risk jeopardizing the health and safety of migrants.

The proposals exemplify the dangers of applying corporate consulting optimization methods to human detention. McKinsey’s trademark focus on measurable metrics and efficiency gains, effective in business contexts, becomes deeply problematic when applied to vulnerable populations in government custody. The incident reveals how management consultants, trained to maximize numerical performance indicators, can lose sight of human costs when pursuing cost reduction targets.