Immediately after President Trump’s election victory in 2024, private prison stocks soared and company executives could hardly contain their glee. As Trump’s immigration crackdown has accelerated, so has enthusiasm for the business of keeping people caged.
More than 90,000 people are incarcerated in private prisons across the United States, where the purpose of holding them is dominated by an incentive to maximize profit, as with any successful business. Many more people live in federal and state prisons where private contractors often source the food and medical care, or receive easy labor from its inhabitants. The more people Immigration and Customs Enforcement puts behind bars, the better for private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic — which is why, according to critics, they’ve been eagerly cheering on the Trump deportation agenda.
Among detained persons as a whole, 90,000 is about 8 percent of the total prison population. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, that number jumps to 90 percent among non-citizen immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security.
“It is possible that because of fluctuations in how many people are in prison, the government doesn’t want to tie itself to those facilities and those beds and the costs of all that without knowing what the actual prison population is going to be,” said Andrea Pitzer, a journalist and author of a book about concentration camp regimes around the world. “Private prisons are a way for the government to outsource some immediate costs and pay for beds over time.”
Of course, for-profit prison companies aren’t taking the load simply out of charity. Before agreeing to detain people for the government, those companies typically sign contracts with ICE that include “guaranteed minimums” where the government pays for all beds, full or empty. That, combined with congressional appropriations bills that often mandate ICE to maintain around 34,000 detention beds every single day, adds more motivation for ICE field directors to round up as many immigrants as they can, lest they appear ineffective and Congress strips away their funding.
Both Republican and Democratic leaders have largely accommodated this carceral logic. While Congress and state legislatures have passed reform to soften criminal sentencing laws, immigration detention remains, technically, a civil jurisdiction and outside their scope. Inside the facilities, the distinction is meaningless. In private prisons across the country, detained persons are herded through secure checkpoints, forced to wear color-coded uniforms, and locked in cells. CoreCivic facilities in Tennessee have come under repeated scrutiny for allegedly allowing violent threats and extortion to run rampant, with guards accused of being unable or unwilling to stop them. In 2023, after officials at GEO Group-operated Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center ignored a recommendation for his release, immigrant Ernesto Rocha-Cuadra was found dead after repeated allegations of physical abuse, medical neglect, and solitary confinement.
“The private prison industry and the federal government are feeding off each other.”
But these stories of abuse and neglect usually only see the light of day under extreme circumstances. The primary difference between public and private prisons, experts told Salon, is that private prisons operate in an even more impenetrable black box than public prisons. Kristie Puckett, a lobbyist who pushes against mass incarceration and the barriers for reentry into society, said that private prisons have “long found success hiding information” about their treatment of people detained in their facilities.
“Private prison companies can justify their non-transparency by saying it’s a proprietor to sensitive information and trade secrets, so it’s harder to get those public records,” she continued. “It’s much harder to enter those facilities to monitor conditions, and when abuse happens, when the company faces a lawsuit, they tend to settle those quietly rather than create any meaningful systemic change. If they decided to just terminate the contract in a certain jurisdiction and walk away from the problem, they can do that rather than fix the problem across the system.”
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Unlike people held under criminal jurisdiction, detained immigrants lack a public defender or any insight into how long they must stay. The opacity can be useful for those at the top: it limits liability and protects the bottom line. Because operational costs eat into a company’s profit, prison managers use the logic of efficiency to lower wages for guards, reduce medical staff, reduce the nutritional content and edibility of meals, and put off the maintenance of facilities. Private prison companies have repeatedly thwarted attempts to break this cycle at the state level. When California attempted to ban for-profit prisons with Assembly Bill 32, the Trump administration and GEO Group sued, successfully arguing in federal court that the state could not interfere with federal “intergovernmental immunity.” GEO Group did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.
Brian Todd, a public affairs manager at CoreCivic, emphasized that the company does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone or have any input on an individual’s deportation or release.
“Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” Todd told Salon in an email. “Our facilities are subject to multiple layers of oversight and are monitored very closely by our government partners to ensure full compliance with policies and procedures, including any applicable detention standards. We also have our own detailed Human Rights Policy that clearly outlines our commitments regarding detainee rights and treatment, including legal rights, safety and security, healthcare, visitation and standards of living. We don’t cut corners on care, staff, or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards.”
Todd added that CoreCivic maintains “an open line of communication” with DHS and ICE officials about “the resources we can make available, beyond those we currently provide, and that “our facilities are contractually required to uphold rigorous federal immigration detention standards, which is a higher standard than some other facilities are required to meet.”
Under a longstanding policy, the company does not “lobby for or against policies or legislation that would determine the basis for or duration of an individual’s incarceration or detention,” Todd noted. According to CoreCivic’s 2023 Political Activity and Lobbying Report, it does “educate federal, state and local officials on the benefits of partnership corrections,” and “make political contributions where allowed by law and where
management has determined that such contributions will be an effective use of the funds.” Critics say that those activities essentially have the same effect. And CoreCivic leaders are certainly conscious of the link between increased detention and shareholder profits, having declared as much in quarterly financial reports.
“The private prison industry and the federal government are feeding off each other,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the Detention Watch Center, told Salon. “The government wants to detain more people so it contracts more private prisons, and the companies that own private prisons or are contracted to work in state and federal prisons lobby for long prison sentences, against parole reform, and for building more prisons.”
It’s clear the Trump administration is still expanding its mass detention project, which equals profits for those in this industry. In December 2025, the administration signed a $140 million contract with Boeing to buy planes for deportations. Thousands more ICE and Border Patrol agents are being recruited, with others offered $50,000 signing bonuses to come out of retirement. And $45 billion in taxpayer money has been earmarked for the construction of even more detention centers, thanks to a budget reconciliation bill passed last summer. Given how few companies exist in this industry, analysts predict most of them will likely be run by GEO Group and CoreCivic.
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Under public pressure, the Biden administration ordered the phasing out of private prison contracts under the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Prisons, but allowed the Department of Homeland Security to continue outsourcing incarceration to corporate giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic. Groups like those have eagerly embraced the Trump administration’s mass incarceration of immigrants, pouring money into pro-Trump Super PACs during his three election campaigns and working closely with federal officials on building a “much more aggressive” policy framework.
Smelling opportunity and anticipating an escalation in anti-immigrant raids, private prison companies quickly converted facilities that had held people charged under criminal law into mass indefinite holding centers for immigrants even before Trump started his second term. After President Joe Biden’s executive order, GEO Group rushed to convert Moshannon Valley Processing Center from a private prison to an immigration detention facility, now the largest immigration facility in the Northeast. According to a 2024 report from Temple University, GEO Group earns $3.4 million each month from this facility alone.
On earnings calls, prison executives have described upticks in border crossings not as a humanitarian reality or even a problem in need of fixing, but as “tailwinds” for their business. In the same way that the dehumanization of whole groups of people as a “problem” has been used to justify an authoritarian state, its need to imprison them has been used to justify the existence of private prisons. Critics charge this is treating people’s liberties as mere commodities.
“An alliance of an unethical, immoral governance, with business who both see opportunity in stripping people’s rights — literally hooking business in and contractors to be providing those [prison] beds — is one of the recipes for how you get to police states and authoritarian regimes,” Pitzer said. “And even if there’s impetus for reform, the outsourcing of repression, the existence of prison infrastructure that can be activated or converted, makes it much harder to reform and much harder to get rid of entirely.”
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