gotchanewsdaily.com 
CNN
—
Just over four years ago on the campaign trail, Joe Biden made a bold pledge to voters that as president he would end the federal use of private prisons – facilities where inmates have long complained of abusive treatment.
But as he left office last month, his record on that matter fell short: While Biden ended the Bureau of Prison’s contracts with private prisons, he allowed their use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand.
Today, because of ICE detainees, the federal government has more people in private prisons than when Biden took office, according to data obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information request and provided to CNN.
And Biden’s choice to exempt ICE from his private prison policies did something more: It paved the way for President Donald Trump to quickly expand their use to hold undocumented immigrants.
Among the flurry of inauguration day executive orders Trump signed was one overturning Biden’s executive order on private prisons. But long before then, in the waning months of the Biden administration, ICE asked private-prison companies such as Geo Group and CoreCivic, among others, for proposals to expand private-prison capacity this year in at least seven states: California, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and Washington. That move came despite ongoing allegations of poor conditions and improper treatment of detainees in many private prisons.
Shareholders in those companies expect a huge payday under Trump. Between Election Day in November and Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Geo Group shares rose 133% in price, while CoreCivic shares jumped nearly 60%, far outpacing the broader stock market.
“They will essentially profit off every step of this process: the detention, the monitoring, the deportation,” said Bianca Tylek, founder and executive director of Worth Rises, an advocacy nonprofit opposed to private prisons. “This is the windfall they were waiting for.”
A shift to immigration detention
In recent decades, the fortunes of private prison companies have tended to rise under Republican administrations and stall under Democrats.
In 2016, President Barack Obama ordered the Department of Justice to phase out and eventually end the use of private prisons, after an inspector general report found private prisons were more violent than publicly run facilities. Trump rescinded that order in his first term. In 2021, Biden again ordered the federal Bureau of Prisons to stop contracting with private prisons, because of concerns similar to those behind Obama’s order five years earlier. Biden’s order also extended to the US Marshals Service, which mostly holds pre-trial detainees.
However, private prison companies effectively found ways to shift federal contracting to immigration detention.
Over Biden’s term, as the number of federal inmates in private prisons under Bureau of Prisons contracts fell to zero from more than 14,000, the number of immigrants detained in private prisons under ICE contracts rose by roughly 24,000, to more than 35,000. By the end of Biden’s term, private prisons held nearly 90 percent of immigrant detainees, nearly identical to the percent at the end of Trump’s first term, according to an ACLU analysis. And overall, private prisons housed nearly 9,000 more federal detainees than at the start of Biden’s term.
That rise took place amid continuing charges of abuse and mistreatment in private facilities. Geo Group is currently fighting a lawsuit from current and former detainees alleging it exposed them to hazardous chemicals at a California detention center. Another Geo Group facility in Tacoma, Washington, has repeatedly faced detainee hunger strikes to protest alleged poor food and medical care, among other issues.
And the Department of Justice’s civil rights division is investigating a CoreCivic detention facility in Tennessee over allegations that staffing shortages exposed detainees to violence and sexual assault. The fate of that case is unclear after the Justice Department recently ordered the division to freeze any ongoing litigation left over from the Biden administration.
A spokesperson for CoreCivic told CNN that the company’s facilities “operate with a significant amount of oversight and accountability,” and said they “adhere to all ICE standards and are monitored by ICE officials on a daily basis.”
The company also rejected claims of mistreatment of detainees at one of its immigration detention facilities in New Mexico, where it is currently fighting a wrongful death lawsuit. “We continue to hear claims about our immigration facilities that simply don’t reflect the quality of the services provided or the professionalism of our team,” said CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin.
Similar issues have surfaced for years. Heavily redacted documents obtained by CNN through public-records requests show that during Trump’s first term, scores of inmates in contracted ICE facilities around the country engaged in hunger strikes to protest their treatment – including at facilities in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and Washington. Many of these hunger strikes have not been previously reported. The reasons behind the hunger strikes aren’t detailed; but groups that have worked with hunger strikers said they see common threads across facilities: denial of medical care, poor conditions, and complaints about physical and sexual assault of detainees, among other issues.
In a statement responding to CNN queries, Geo Group said all their facilities “are closely monitored in accordance with government contract standards” and that the company works with government agencies “to ensure that all persons entrusted to our care are treated in a safe, secure and humane manner.” It added, “We believe that many instances of hunger strikes at GEO-Contracted ICE Processing Centers are instigated and coordinated by politically motivated outside groups.”
On Jan. 16, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling against Geo Group, saying it must pay past detainees at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, and the state of Washington, $23.2 million in back pay for making detainees work for only $1 a day or less rather than the state minimum wage. The order also said detained workers must be paid the state minimum wage, currently $16.66 an hour.
In a statement, Geo Group noted that the Department of Justice had agreed with the company that applying state minimum wage laws would violate principles of intergovernmental immunity. The company said it “strongly disagrees with this decision and will continue to vigorously pursue all available appeals.”
‘Hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals’
Geo Group, which is ICE’s biggest detention contractor, has worked hard to cement ties with the new administration and with ICE. It was the first corporation of any kind to have its PAC max out on donations to a Trump super PAC during the 2024 campaign, according to one watchdog group’s analysis.
In recent years, at least nine senior officials have moved to Geo Group after leaving ICE, CNN found.
Just days after Trump’s election, Geo Group CEO Brian Evans gushed about the company’s prospects on its corporate earnings call, projecting that its revenue could grow by $400 million annually. The following month, the company announced a $70 million investment to expand capacity to serve ICE immigration detention needs in preparation for “potentially unprecedented future growth opportunities” under Trump.
“We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands or even several millions of individuals,” Geo Group President Wayne Calabrese said on the earnings call. Geo Group’s subsidiaries include companies that transport immigrant detainees and provide ankle monitors and other devices to track them.
In his inaugural address, Trump repeated his campaign promise of mass deportations. “We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” he said.
The White House issued sweeping executive orders intended to lay the groundwork for mass deportations, to seek an end to birthright citizenship, and to end many asylum and refugee protections. The Trump administration carried out highly publicized immigration sweeps in its first week, including in Chicago where former TV talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw “embedded” with an ICE team.
The Bottom Line
Many pieces of Trump’s plans – including using the US military on domestic soil to aid in immigration enforcement and oversee planned detention camps – already face legal and logistical challenges. That’s one reason why expanding the use of private prisons by ICE matters so much: It’s comparatively easy – albeit expensive.
An ICE memo sent to Congress before the inauguration said that expanding the detention of migrants charged with or arrested for possible criminal offenses could cost more than $3.2 billion a year. It noted that the agency currently is funded for more than 41,000 detention beds but would need to contract for at least 110,000 beds to meet a GOP-led immigrant detention bill that Trump signed last week.
“A lot of what Trump and [Homeland Security advisor Stephen] Miller want to get people excited about would be very expensive. It would be a question of how fast they can shovel the money out to the private prison companies, CoreCivic, Geo, etc. – the companies where ICE senior leaders go to work when they leave the government,” Scott Shuchart, a former ICE assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy, told CNN.
But much will depend on Congressional willingness to loosen the purse-strings. “Is Congress going to double ICE’s budget? To do what they are promising would be ramping it up by a factor of 10 or 20,” Shuchart said.
ICE did not respond to CNN queries about its plans to expand detention capacity through new contracts.
It isn’t clear yet how quickly or to what degree immigrant detention will ramp up under the new administration, but enforcement actions may already be broadening. Trump scrapped a policy that kept ICE agents from going into churches and schools. And his “border czar,” Tom Homan, said that agents also will detain other undocumented immigrants they come across while seeking out those with criminal records, nationwide.
On Jan. 29, Trump signed into the law the Laken Riley Act, which would significantly expand the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with, arrested for, convicted of, or who have admitted, to various criminal offenses.
The act would require a huge surge in federal detention capacity that doesn’t currently exist, offering the private prison industry a potential windfall, says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice who has written a book on the industry.
“The federal government needs to rely on the private sector to help build that capacity,” said Eisen. “It paves the way for these companies to see significant profits.”
