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'Cruelty Is the Point': Private Prison Giants Set to Cash In as Trump Revives Family Detention
"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment."
Mar 07, 2025
Private prison companies in the United States can hardly contain their excitement as the Trump administration moves to revive the practice of detaining migrant families at facilities with records of horrifying abuses, a decision that advocacy groups say highlights the White House's disdain for human rights as it carries out its large-scale assault on immigrants.
"Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies," Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Thursday after CBS Newsreported the administration's moves.
According to CBS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—newly empowered by President Donald Trump—"was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children" on Thursday "in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors."
"The group includes three children," the outlet added, citing an internal government report.
Separately, NBC Newsreported Thursday that "U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown."
"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes," NBC observed. "The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories."
As part of the revival of family detention—which was used by the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, and largely ended by the Biden administration—immigration officials are "refitting" two Texas facilities, including the notorious detention center in Dilley, Texas.
CoreCivic, a private prison company, has been newly contracted by ICE to reopen the facility for family detention.
"I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career," Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's CEO, told investors last month.
George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, said last week that "we've never seen anything like this before," referring to the speed with which the Trump administration is moving to procure contracts for migrant detention.
The New York Timesreported Friday that "a GEO Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million to Republican PACs that accept unlimited donations, with the bulk going to groups that supported House Republicans and Mr. Trump."
"It is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
The Detention Watch Network noted that while the Dilley center was "in operation for family detention, there were reports of foul water and negligent medical treatment, with hospitals confirming that children are consistently released with health issues they dubbed 'Dilley-ish.'"
"In 2018, a 19-month-old girl, Mariee, tragically died after leaving the facility, and in 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a 5-year-old," the organization said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote earlier this week that he visited the center in December 2018 and "it was horrifying."
"The cruelty and abuse of Trump's family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation," Merkley wrote on social media. "I'm calling on the admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said Thursday that "it is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
"Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children," said Ghandehari. "Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community-based groups—never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence."
"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment," Ghandehari added. "Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability."
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H.R. 29 Is for Advancing Corporate Greed, Not Protecting Americans
This bill would strip judges of discretion and require immigrants to be detained and subject to deportation if they’re accused—not even convicted—of even minor offenses, benefiting private prison companies.
Jan 17, 2025
You’re reading the words of a formerly undocumented immigrant.
When I fled El Salvador four decades ago, I was 12 years old and alone. I wanted to escape the country’s civil war, where U.S.-backed death squads had made murders and rape our daily reality.
I reunited with my sisters, my only surviving family, in Wichita, Kansas. Once there, I helped open churches, started businesses, and raised three daughters. There were times I wasn’t sure we’d make it to the end of the month, but I was grateful for the sense of peace and security we were able to create here.
We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community.
That’s why I’m so alarmed that the new Republican-led Congress has chosen to open with a bill, H.R. 29, that strikes fear in the hearts of immigrant families all across the country. This bill would strip judges of discretion and require immigrants to be detained and subject to deportation if they’re accused—not even convicted—of even minor offenses like shoplifting.
This major assault on due process won’t keep anyone safer. It would terrorize all immigrants in this country, who studies show are much less likely to commit crimes of any kind than native-born Americans.
So who benefits from H.R. 29? Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, who made a fortune during the last Trump administration by running private prisons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
CoreCivic and GEO kept immigrants and asylum seekers in inhumane and toxic conditions with poor hygiene and exposed women and children to sexual predators. Under this new law, cynical executives will siphon off more public dollars, and wealthy investors will reap more rewards, from abusing and demonizing people seeking refuge from violence or poverty.
When President-elect Donald Trump won, private prison stocks soared. Why? Because investors anticipated making a fortune detaining immigrants. More than 90% of migrants detained by ICE end up in for-profit facilities.
GEO Group, which maxed out its campaign contributions to Trump, told its investors they could make almost $400 million per year supporting “future needs for ICE and the federal government” in a second Trump term. Their stock price nearly doubled in November.
Whether those detained are guilty or not, CoreCivic and GEO get paid. That’s what H.R. 29 is for: advancing corporate greed, not protecting Americans.
We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community. In addition to jailing immigrants, for-profit prison companies also look for ways to put citizens in prison more often—and for longer—so they can make more money.
Whenever we allow fundamental rights to be taken away, we erode our shared humanity and diminish all of our rights and freedoms.
The people behind H.R. 29 want us to be afraid of each other so we won’t stand together. They want to be able to barge into our homes, schools, and churches to take our neighbors and loved ones away. They want workers to be too scared to stand up to their bosses’ abuse. All so their donors in the private prison industry can make more money.
Democrats will need to find their way in this new Congress. Falling in line behind nativist fear-mongers who take millions in campaign contributions from the private-prison industry is not the right way to do it.
Americans demand better. We want true leadership with an affirmative vision for the future of this country and dignity for all people, including immigrants.
H.R. 29 targets whole communities because of the language we speak and the color of our skin. Instead, our elected leaders, regardless of party, must work to address people’s needs through building an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.
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Trump's Planned Immigrant Purge Sends Stagnant Private Prison Stocks Soaring
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment... and the opportunity that it will bring," said the firm's chair.
Nov 08, 2024
The chairperson of a leading U.S. private prison corporation on Thursday gushed over the "unprecedented opportunity" presented by the prospect of Republican President-elect Donald Trump delivering on his campaign promise to begin the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants on his first day in office.
As
Common Dreamsreported Thursday, Trump's campaign confirmed that "the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants" ever is set to start immediately after the former president returns to the White House on January 20.
GEO Group stock surged more than 56% from the close of trading on Tuesday, Election Day, to Friday's closing bell. Competitor CoreCivic shares skyrocketed 57% over the same period. By contrast, GEO Group stock saw just a 21% rise in the three months preceding Election Day. CoreCivic inched up just 11% over the same period.
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company's [and] country's history, and the opportunity that it will bring," GEO Group founder and chairperson George Zoley said during a Thursday earnings call call in which he hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" ahead, according to a company statement and coverage by HuffPost.
"While our third-quarter results were below our expectations due to lower-than-expected revenues in our electronic monitoring and supervision services segment, we believe we have several potential sources of upside to our current quarterly run rate, with possible future growth opportunities across our diversified services platform," Zoley continued.
"We have 18,000 available beds across contracted and idle secure services facilities, which if fully activated, would provide significant potential upside to our financial performance," he noted. "We also believe we have the necessary resources to materially scale up the service levels in our [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program] and air and ground transportation contracts."
Zoley added that "as we evaluate and pursue future growth opportunities, we remain focused on the disciplined allocation of capital to further reduce our debt, deleverage our balance sheet, and position our company to evaluate options to return capital to shareholders in the future."
According to a study published last month by the American Immigration Council, deporting the estimated 13.3 million people in the U.S. without authorization in one massive sweep would cost around $315 billion, while expelling 1 million undocumented immigrants per year would cost nearly $1 trillion cumulatively over a decade.
On Thursday, Trump insisted "there is no price tag" on his deportation plan. He dismissed concerns that such an operation would require the use of concentration camps like the mass detention centers—which one Trump official euphemistically compared with "summer camp"—of his first administration.
The private prison industry has also thrived during the Biden administration, which is on pace to match the 1.5 million people deported during Trump's previous presidency. Although President Joe Biden signed an executive order "on reforming our incarceration system to eliminate the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities" early during his tenure, the directive did not apply to detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
The number of immigrants detained by the Biden administration doubled between 2021 and 2023. In July 2023, more than 90% of immigrants detained by ICE each day were locked up in private facilities. In January 2020, the last month of Trump's first term, 81% of daily detainees were held in private lockups.
In 2022 a bipartisan U.S. Senate probe corroborated allegations of staff abuse against migrants jailed at facilities owned by LaSalle, a private prison company that
claims to be "run with family values." Whistleblowers and others have also revealed abuses from torture and medical neglect to sexual assault of children and forced sterilizations at privately run immigration detention centers.
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