Three months after reacting with giddiness that Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign promise would make them boatloads of money, private prison executives are as optimistic as ever ― and they’re licking their lips at a potentially massive immigration enforcement budget from the Republican-controlled Congress.
“We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced,” David Donahue, the CEO of GEO Group, said on a quarterly earningscall Thursday. GEO Group is the largest private contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,” Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, another major private prison player, said in that company’s earningscall last month.
The optimism from the prison executives comes as Congress could dramatically increase the money that Trump can use to arrest, jail and deport undocumented people.
Recentdatashows that the pure numbers behind Trump’s deportation record are, so far, actually pretty similar to those during former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Still, Trump has tremendous power to detain and deport far more people than he did in his first term ― but the details of how he’ll do so are still fuzzy.
“I don’t doubt that they’re going to grow this detention system a lot,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch goingNetwork, a coalition of advocacy groups campaigning for the end of immigration detention in the United States, ahead of GEO Group’s call Thursday.
The unanswered question, she added, is “the scale of what they can do.”
Execs See Detention Bed Demand Quadrupling
As of Feb. 27, there were 43,759 undocumented people in ICE custody, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC, an independent organization that combs through federal data. That’s the highest number since the first Trump administration, when it reached 55,654.
Early last month, CBS News reported that ICE had hit around 42,000 people in its custody, forcing the agency to release dozens of people a day due to lack of space. Numerous observers havedecried poor reporting and record-keeping by ICE, making numbers difficult to verify.
The detainees are held by a mix of federal immigration facilities, private contractors, and state and local facilities that lease space to the feds. The Trump administration is also reportedly using federal prisons for immigration detention, raising serious legal and ethical questions. And on Feb. 1, Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan told the National Sheriffs’ Association that he was working on lowering detention standards so that local jurisdictions like sheriff’s offices could jail ICE detainees without adhering to national standards.
“If that’s good enough for a U.S. citizen in your county, it’s good enough for an illegal immigrant detained for us,” Homan said. “We need your bed space. We need your 287(g) agreements,” he added separately, later, referring to local law enforcement helping ICE with immigration enforcement.
But driven by the so-called “Laken Riley Act,” which mandates the jailing of undocumented people even if they are simply accused of a crime as minor as shoplifting, and Trump’s campaign promise of a “mass deportation” effort, Congress could choose to significantly increase funding for immigration detention ― meaning a big payday for the prison contractors.
On the private prison companies’ earnings calls, executives cited pressreports on ICE estimates that the new law would require 60,000 to 110,000 new detention beds to jail everyone who fits its extremely broad language. They added an estimated 100,000 additional beds supposedly needed to meet Trump’s existing demands for “mass deportation,” both at the border and in the interior of the country.
In all, Hininger said, “It feels like 150,000 to 200,000 is where they’re going to end up.”
“We believe that an increase of between 100,000 and 160,000 beds will require a wide range of solutions,” GEO Group founder and Executive Chairman George Zoley said on that company’s call.
The Trump administration has not been transparent with its plans, but reports indicate they’re aiming high when it comes to immigration detention. In December, Homan said he’d need 100,000 beds “minimum” “because we got a big population to look for.” And a couple days after Trump’s inauguration, The Washington Post reported on briefing documents stating ICE was preparing to more than double its detention capacity, through a mix of four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 other sites with between 700- and 1,000-person capacity.
GEO Group and the Trump administration announced plans last week to reopen a 1,000-bed facility in New Jersey, which will be the largest such facility in the New York metro area, The City reported. And CoreCivic announced Thursday that it had modified existing contracts with ICE to add capacity for over 1,000 additional ICE detainees across four existing facilities.
And other detention facilities remain idle, ready to reopen if needed ― but real questions remain about where Trump proposes to put immigrants detained by his administration.
Military bases are one option. One internal proposal would use up to 11 military bases around the country to hold thousands of detainees, NPR reported recently. And the administration is already using Guantanamo Bay to jail hundreds of migrants.
As with most immigration detention, the line between public and private resources is blurred at Guantanamo Bay. Akima, the private conglomerate with numerous other detention contracts across the country, was contracted by the Trump administration to run its Guantanamo operation, as well. It was previously contracted for the same job by the Biden administration, though on a smaller scale. The Guardian recently reported on allegations of use of force and health and safety violations at the company’s facilities.
Navy personnel are also involved in increasing Guantanamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center capacity up to 2,000, according to a military press release. Trump has spoken about holding as many as 30,000 people at the site; even if he’s exaggerating, getting anywhere near that number would be a huge expansion of the United States’ immigrant detention machine.
It also brings troubling human rights concerns. Already, detainees are experiencing terrible conditions, severe isolation, limited access to legal counsel, and false allegations from the U.S. government that they are gang members, according to mediareports and multiplelawsuits from the ACLU and other groups.
Congress Could Fuel Mass Detention, Deportations
The Trump administration’s deportation goals rely to some extent on its budget. Without more money for more beds, travel and agents, “mass deportation” is just a slogan.
And that all depends on Congress, which is controlled by Republicans in both chambers.
The Senate last month approved a “ten-fold” increase in the budget for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agencies concerned with interior and border immigration enforcement, respectively. Still, the budget will take time to complete. And without specifics, projections are difficult.
“When we look at all numbers together – what they’ve proposed at Gitmo, what they’ve proposed here in the U.S. so far, at the military bases, et cetera – it’s a tripling of capacity already, which is roughly the same number of people in internment camps in World War II, around 120,000,” Shah said.
“It’s hard to say what to anticipate, the announcements have all been so bananas,” she added. “But I can see them adding another 10-, 20,000 beds this year, I don’t know.” Compared to the first Trump administration, Shah noted, “They’re much more focused on interior arrests.”
And though they’re the minority, it’s also unclear whether Democrats plan much opposition to the immigration enforcement expansion.
Twelve Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted for the Laken Riley Act, which massively expands ICE’s mandate to jail undocumented people. And the immigration reform deal that the Biden administration pushed ― which Trump ultimatelysabotaged, stopping it in its tracks ― would have provided funding for 50,000 beds in immigration detention, and it conceded a slew of right-wing priorities. Politico called the bill “the most stringent immigration bill endorsed by a Democratic president in recent memory.”
The New Jersey detention center that recently reopened did so after the Biden administration solicited proposals for a New Jersey-area detention facility last year, and only after they took CoreCivic’s side in a lawsuit against a New Jersey law against private immigration detention, The City noted.
The private prison executives said they were closely watching budget negotiations.
“The timing of government actions on new contracts is always difficult to predict,” CoreCivic CFO David Garfinkle said on that company’s earnings call last month.
“I think the timetable on that is kind of March, maybe early April,” Hininger added later, referring to congressional budget negotiations. “Being captain obvious: Funding’s gonna be key here.”
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That funding won’t all go to detention. Immigration enforcement money will also fuel new hiring, deportation flights to take people out of the country or between detention facilities, and “alternatives to detention” programs, such as GPS monitors and phone apps that track people outside of physical custody.
A GEO Group subsidiary controls the only current alternatives to the detention contract.
“We are ramping up our inventory of ankle monitors at our Boulder, Colorado, facility,” Zoley said. Earlier, he repeated a line from the company’s November earnings call: Between digital and body-worn surveillance, the company was ready to scale the program up from a couple hundred thousand participants to, potentially, “millions.”