Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime

On the ropes in 2016, CoreCivic, GEO Group, and others see big money in immigration detention.

Mother Jones Illustration

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In October, when executives from the country’s biggest prison company held their annual leadership conference at a golf resort owned by President Donald Trump, they had much to celebrate: lucrative contracts, strong stock prices, and a good shot at expanding their reach in the year ahead, thanks largely to a broadening crackdown on undocumented immigrants and a need for more space to detain them.

It was a glaring reminder of how far the private prison industry has come since the final months of the Obama administration, when—shortly after the publication of Mother Jones’ award-winning investigation of a Louisiana private prison—the Justice Department pledged to phase out contracts with prison companies and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigrant detention, suggested it might consider doing the same. Those days now seem far behind for America’s for-profit prison giants, which heartily backed Trump during the campaign, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to his inaugural committee after the election, and are now set to benefit from his newly passed tax plan. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons,” Trump said in 2016. “It seems to work a lot better.”

When Trump got to Washington, the biggest prison companies were already making more money than ever from immigrant detention, and today their prospects have never looked rosier. Fueled by the administration’s deportation dragnet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has predicted a surge in its daily population of detainees, from around 34,000 in July to more than 51,000 over the next year—and prison companies are more than happy to accommodate. In April, GEO Group executives won the administration’s first private immigration detention contract, for a facility in Conroe, Texas, that’s expected to bring in $44 million annually. This year the company also started operating an ICE detention center in Folkston, Georgia, that could boost its revenue another $21 million.

Another opportunity for growth might be farther north. Under Trump, immigration enforcement has shifted, with fewer migrants apprehended at the border and many more caught in raids throughout the country’s interior. That means ICE is hoping to incarcerate more of its detainees in the heartland, near where they’re arrested. “It’s good business sense to have bed capacity in close proximity to where our operations are,” says Philip Miller, deputy executive associate director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations.

The private prison industry is heeding the call. In October, ICE issued a request for information about potential locations for up to 3,000 new detention beds within 180 miles of Chicago, Detroit, Salt Lake City, and St. Paul, Minnesota. While ICE isn’t answering questions about who responded to its October inquiry (the National Immigrant Justice Center has a pending Freedom of Information Act request), it’s not hard to guess who’s in the running. Soon after ICE’s request went out, GEO Group chairman and CEO George Zoley told investors that his company was “very interested” in building the new detention centers the government was looking for. “GEO has such an appetite for these kinds of facilities,” Zoley said, “particularly with the contemplated length of the contracts—which we estimate to be approximately 10 years.” And Sheriff Michael Downey of Kankakee County, Illinois, whose department was the only public agency to respond to ICE’s Chicago-area request, says an ICE official told him that “all the major players” in the private prison industry had also expressed interest. 

One of those players is CoreCivic—formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA—which in early December proposed a $100 million detention center in Elkhart, Indiana, across a county road from the local landfill and jail. The site, within 180 miles of Chicago and Detroit, would initially have 1,240 beds but could later be expanded to hold 1,400 people, making it one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country.

CoreCivic’s construction proposal will go before Elkhart County commissioners early next year, and ICE is planning to ask for formal bids around Chicago in 2018. In the meantime, a coalition of local residents and immigrant rights activists are leading a campaign against CoreCivic, arguing that the detention center would drive out immigrant workers and exacerbate an already acute labor shortage in the booming manufacturing town. “I know people who are thinking about, if this happens, they’re packing up and leaving,” resident Rafael Correa told a local news crew.

But according to coalition organizer Richard Aguirre, most Elkhart officials and business leaders have so far been reluctant to criticize the proposal publicly, and it still has a solid chance of being approved next year. CoreCivic, Aguirre says, “thought they would get a warm reception here because this is a decisive county for Donald Trump.” 

So is Uinta County, Wyoming, which went 72 percent for Trump in 2016 and where local officials in June passed resolutions unanimously supporting a bid by the Utah-based Management & Training Corporation to construct a for-profit immigration detention center near a local “road to nowhere.” Unlike Elkhart, Uinta—hurt by the loss of its oil and gas sector, and badly in need of the tax revenue and 150 or so jobs an MTC facility would bring—resembles the depressed regions historically targeted by private prison companies for development. (According to a Uinta County Herald report, the county clerk “thinks the proposed facility has the potential to be one of the best things to happen to the county in a very long time.”) MTC’s proposal hasn’t been finalized, but the company hopes to fill ICE’s need for detention capacity near Salt Lake City, a company spokesman confirmed last month. 

Meanwhile, despite the drop-off in border apprehensions, detention centers in the Southwest are far from empty. Back in October, CoreCivic reported to investors that migration across the border had started to tick back up—and that more immigrants were slowly filling its detention centers. “If this trend continues,” CEO Damon Hininger said, “it is likely ICE will have additional detention capacities for interior enforcement…as well as in traditional Southwest border regions.” ICE is even seeking an additional 1,000 beds in Texas, where it already has capacity to detain more than 10,000 immigrants. Expanding the country’s immigration detention network to more than 51,000 beds will require $1.2 billion from Congress, though it’s unclear if that kind of money will be made available. The Senate’s budget bill would boost detention funds by 7 percent but would only cover about 39,000 beds, while the House’s bill would fund about 44,000. “My best guess is that ICE’s final funding for detention will be somewhere between those goalposts,” says Mary Small, a policy director for Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that monitors immigrant detention. “But I also think it’s very important to say that in this Congress, who the hell knows?”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate