Big business: ICE and the private prison industry

It was Super Bowl Sunday in 1984 when a roadside motel in Houston closed its doors to 87 immigrants who lacked documentation. Three businessmen chose to transform The Olympic Motel into a makeshift detention center and cashed their first check from the U.S. government.

One of the men, Terrell Don Hutto, ran plantations for prison farms in Texas and Arkansas. His work gave the other two, Robert Crants and Tom Beasley, a novel idea: What if they could start a private company that operated prisons on behalf of the federal government – and get paid to do it?

The company they formed, Corrections Corporation of America, became the world’s first private prison company. Four decades later, it’s called CoreCivic, and it remains one of the biggest players in the private prison game. It may soon become even bigger.

With July’s passage of what President Donald Trump called the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now America’s highest-funded law enforcement agency. And to support Trump’s mass deportation campaign, private prison companies like CoreCivic are poised to receive a lot more cash to create detention facilities.

Private prison corporations

The private prison industry is a far cry from the dusty beginnings of the Reagan era’s Texas roadside motel. Today, 90% of people detained by ICE are held in facilities run by private corporations.

Some of the largest players in the industry, such as CoreCivic and GEO Group, are publicly traded. Both companies’ stocks have nearly doubled since this time in 2024. These companies attract major investors, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and hire influential lobbyists, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who represented the GEO Group in Washington in 2019.

The companies’ standing waned during President Joe Biden’s administration. Early in his term, Biden severed contracts between the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and private prison firms. However, he did not cut off a significant source of their funding: contracts with ICE. Still, critics said Biden was too soft on those who came to the United States without full documentation. 

“Catch-and-release was one of the big draws under Biden,” former diplomat Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told Straight Arrow News. “Everyone from Cameroon to China knew if they could just get to the border, they’d be released. Worst case, you lost your asylum application, but that could take many years. That red carpet is no longer rolled out.” 

During the 2024 election, employees and political action committees affiliated with CoreCivic made campaign contributions totaling more than $784,000, primarily to Republicans, according to campaign finance data analyzed by OpenSecrets. GEO Group’s employees and PACs gave even more: about $3.7 million, including $1 million to Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s primary fundraising arm.

The companies are among the government’s financial beneficiaries pushing to arrest and, ultimately, deport more unauthorized immigrants. The daily quota of ICE arrests has reportedly risen from 1,800 to 3,000. 

“As we stand on the precipice of an explosion of mass detention, it’s critical to acknowledge that if these [private prison] corporations didn’t exist, it would be difficult for the federal government to execute its plans,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, told SAN. “Those firms stand to reap major financial benefits as the U.S. detains more and more immigrants. The business model of contracting with these for-profit prison firms allows for wild upswings in detention by offering the government vast capacity.”

In the mega-bill passed earlier this month, Congress earmarked $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security initiatives, including a $45 billion allocation for immigration detention. Officials intend to increase detention capacity from a daily average of 41,500 people to at least 100,000, according to Reuters. 

Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur, now a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said it’s cost-effective to work with private prison companies. 

“If ICE has a detention facility, it has to pay a federal officer to staff that, with all of the benefits of being a federal employee – savings plan, pension,” Arthur told SAN. “Whereas if those costs are borne by a private facility, the private company bears the costs for that employee. And when that space is no longer needed, the government can exit those contracts. Plainly, they’d have to pay the bill, but they wouldn’t have to maintain the facilities that aren’t used.” 

On their websites, both CoreCivic and GEO Group say they prioritize speed and efficiency of building detention facilities. CoreCivic, for example, says it takes 12 to 18 months to design and construct a facility, compared to four to five years for the public sector.

Spokespersons for both companies told SAN they were not available for interviews.

Limited space for a new agenda 

Administration officials say one of the biggest hurdles for Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the limited detention space available. So, the administration sought other ways to house individuals detained by ICE. 

It sent detainees to places such as the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, in El Salvador.

It is also relying on some states to invest in makeshift detention facilities. Florida, for instance, transformed an airfield in a remote area of the Everglades into a 5,000-bed detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The administration has even used the military to support its immigration agenda. The U.S. Army hired private prison company Acquisition Logistics to build a 5,000-bed ICE detention tent camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

ICE is also renting beds from local jails around the U.S.

“Local jail space that ICE can rent out is better for the federal government because they don’t have to pay to transport someone in the U.S.,” said Arthur, who heard thousands of cases as an immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, from 2006 to 2015. “But it’s also better for the respondents, which is what we call aliens in court, because they’re closer to their families and attorneys.”

Support and backlash  

Some states are taking a stand against the Trump administration. New Jersey, Maryland and California, for example, have passed state statutes attempting to limit the availability of ICE detention space — both public and privately operated — in their states. However, these laws are being challenged in higher courts, with at least one being overturned. 

“The issue with these laws is they don’t make sense,” Arthur said. “If they can’t detain people in New Jersey or California, then they’ll ship them to places like Florida. By limiting private detention space, states force ICE to send aliens to detention facilities farther away from their attorneys and families.” 

Others disagree. Organizations such as Detention Watch Network say immigration detention facilities should be abolished altogether.

“Trump’s weaponization of immigration detention to expand his authoritarian strategies has made clear that this cruel, abusive system never should have existed in the first place,” the organization said in a July 22 statement. “For decades, politicians across the political spectrum have sold us a lie that immigration is a public safety issue, but the reality is that when you accept the premise that some people are deserving of incarceration, detention or deportation, the scope of who is eligible is always under the threat of expanding.” 

Hankinson sees it differently. 

“Most people don’t believe in some international human right to migrate,” Hankinson said. “The reason why Trump made the border a focus is that’s what his constituents want, they want to focus on national security.” 

Is there accountability? 

Even immigration detention facilities run by private prison corporations are subject to oversight to maintain humane conditions. 

“The contracts these companies sign with ICE require them to meet certain legal standards when it comes to conditions of the facilities and rights for individuals detained,” said the Brennan Center’s Eisen, who wrote the book “Inside Private Prisons.”

A CoreCivic spokesperson backed this up.

“It’s certainly true that our facilities are subject to significant oversight, including regular independent audits without any prior notice,”  Brian Todd told SAN by email. “In fact, more than 500 ICE officials are currently assigned to our detention facilities, including full-time onsite monitors who ensure real-time accountability.” 

What’s more, Todd said, immigration lawyers, volunteers and elected officials regularly visit CoreCivic’s facilities.

ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, said the detention centers are not prisons.

“Detention is non-punitive,” ICE’s website says. “ICE uses its limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States — as well as those that are subject to mandatory detention, as outlined by the Immigration and Nationality Act, or those that ICE determines are a public safety or flight risk during the custody determination process.”