Private Prisons Are Set To Massively Profit From Stephen Miller’s Mass Detention Agenda
And they can barely contain their glee. “This is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” one private prison executive said earlier this year.
Stephen Miller isn’t the only one thrilled about the unprecedented infusion of taxpayer funds going to his anti-immigrant agenda under the big, ugly budget. Because most immigrants detained by ICE are jailed in privately-operated facilities, the Trump administration’s goal to balloon detention capacity to 100,000 beds will result in financial windfalls for private prison companies, which were major donors to Trump in 2024. Now their investments in human misery are set to reap massive dividends.
Under the big, ugly budget, $45 billion of the nearly $171 billion dedicated to brutal immigration enforcement will go towards building new ICE detention camps to jail immigrants, including children and families.
Two of the private prison companies in particular, CoreCivic and GEO Group, are set to see profits that could cumulatively reach into the billions. While neither company explicitly endorsed Trump in the previous election, their numerous donations said it all. “In the 2024 election cycle, employees and PACs affiliated with the publicly traded industry behemoths GEO Group and CoreCivic contributed overwhelmingly to Republicans and Trump,” The Intercept reported.
GEO Group became the first corporation to max out to Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, CREW said last July. That same month, GEO then used a subsidiary, Geo Acquisition II, to donate an additional $500,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. Total donations to Make America Great Again Inc. totaled $1 million after Geo Acquisition II contributed another half million later that year, ABC News reported in November 2024.
Meanwhile, CoreCivic president Damon Hininger donated more than a quarter of a million dollars “to a joint fundraising committee between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee over the last year,” ABC News continued. But the donations from the private prison profiteers didn’t stop after the November election. “When Trump won, the two companies gave $500,000 each to his inaugural committee,” Intercept noted.
And, they knew exactly what they were doing. While previous presidents capped individual donations to their inaugurals, Trump “unabashedly marketed his 2025 inauguration as an influence-buying free-for-all,” the Campaign Legal Center said.
Overall, “Republicans received 92 percent of $3.7 million in contributions affiliated with GEO Group and 96 percent of the $785,000 in contributions affiliated with CoreCivic, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group that tracks official disclosures,” The Intercept said. “Even though the industry kept profiting from the Biden administration — despite a supposed ban on private prisons — one advocate said it was clear to her why companies went all-in on Trump.” The mass deportation of millions of Dreamers, grandparents, and long-settled immigrants at risk to our national stability and in violation of our values as a multicultural nation was Trump’s signature promise of the 2024 campaign.
“The private prison corporations were keenly aware of the implications of the then-Trump campaign’s platform for mass deportations,” ACLU National Prison Project Senior Staff Attorney Eunice Hyunhye Cho told The Intercept. “There is no doubt that these private prison companies were keenly aware of the potential profits to be made under such a scheme.” There’s certainly no doubt when private prison executives have plainly admitted knowing on which side their bread is buttered.
During a November 2024 call with investors, GEO Group founder George Zoley said the company “was built for this unique moment in our … country’s history and the opportunities that it will bring,” said the Brennan Center for Justice. CoreCivic’s Damon Hininger “opened an investor call last month on a buoyant note,” The New York Times reported earlier this year. “‘I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” he said, adding that the company was anticipating in the next several years ‘perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history.’” That report was titled, “Private Prisons Are Ramping Up Detention of Immigrants and Cashing In.”
The books have confirmed that: 30% of CoreCivic’s revenue comes from ICE contracts, while 43% of GEO Group’s revenue comes from such agreements, according to the Brennan Center. Shares in GEO Group and CoreCivic also soared after Trump’s victory, and after Tom Homan’s appointment as so-called border czar. Homan had previously stated that if Trump returned to power, “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen … They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
“Beyond its political donations, GEO Group has also lined Trump’s pockets by spending at Trump businesses,” CREW said. “In 2017, the company broke tradition and held its conference at Trump Doral rather than its own headquarters, and its Vice President had stayed at Trump’s DC Hotel at least 10 times by June 2019.”
And while CoreCivic’s Hininger might view the second Trump administration as “exciting,” that’s probably not the adjective that would be used by most immigrants caught in ICE’s grasp. “Records of hundreds of emergency calls from ICE detention centers obtained by WIRED—including audio recordings—show a system inundated by life-threatening incidents, delayed treatment, and overcrowding,” the outlet recently reported. At the Everglades detention camp in Florida – which also opened to the financial benefit of top GOP donors – detained men said they’ve been fed maggot-infested food, are unable to access water and necessary medications, have to endure 24/7 lighting, and have even been denied their ability to practice their faiths.
"They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion,” said one detained man. “And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith.”
Both private prison companies have faced their own accusations of abuses against immigrants jailed for ICE, including “allegations of medical negligence, abusive and retaliatory behavior against immigrants, sexual harassment, poor food and water quality and other dangerous conditions,” The Guardian reported in February. Both GEO Group and CoreCivic have faced accusations of forced labor, including alleging that officials made migrants work for as little as $1 a day or face punishment. In 2017, a jury found GEO Group liable for violating Washington’s Minimum Wage Act through its use of forced labor at the state’s Northwest ICE Processing Center, ordering the company to pay more than $17 million in back wages to workers. Washington “filed the lawsuit against GEO in September 2017, alleging that GEO’s practice violates Washington law by paying workers less than the minimum wage, and that GEO unjustly enriched itself by doing so,” said the state attorney general’s office. GEO Group continues to fight the decision. Others stand to benefit from mass deportation in other ways, too:
Under the big, ugly budget, ICE’s detention capacity stands to balloon to unprecedented levels as the administration has also taken steps to dismantle oversight mechanisms that are key to tackling the kinds of abuses that’ve come to light under investigations and litigation. This will leave thousands of individuals – including children – highly vulnerable to abuses with little to no form of accountability.
“There’s no reporting requirement to Congress, no oversight mechanism,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at American Immigration Council, recently told Bolts. “And the Trump administration earlier this year gutted oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security—the civil rights and civil liberties office, the office of immigrant detention ombudsman. Those didn’t have much teeth, but they were key to be able to submit complaints about civil rights violations or issues in immigration detention. But now those agencies have been whittled down. In fact, Republicans through the appropriations process want to go further and eliminate the immigrant detention ombudsman office completely.”
“So oversight mechanisms are being whittled away—at the same time that the reconciliation process is giving billions of dollars through these broad instructions,” Orozco continued.