Private Prison Companies Call Trump’s Deportation Plans ‘Unprecedented Opportunity’

On earnings calls Thursday, private prison groups expressed a nearly unrestrained glee over what one called the “unprecedented opportunity” that a second Trump administration brings.

Trump made mass deportation of undocumented immigrants ― and even some immigrants who are here legally ― a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, building on years of racist and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, speaking affectionately for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mass deportation program, and even invoking an 18th-century law that would give him broad powers to pursue deportations.

Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes, including violent crimes, than American citizens; massively contribute to the economy; and oftentimes have spent years or decades establishing lives, families and communities in the United States.

Key Trump advisors have also openly discussed building mass deportation camps along the border capable of detaining tens of thousands of people at a time as judges process their deportation orders, attached to “constantly” operating runways with deportation flights around the world. While Democratic presidents have also massively expanded the immigration incarceration and deportation system in recent years, Trump is proposing his own generational escalation.

That sort of thing is music to the ears of private prison operators ― whose stock prices soared upon the projections of Trump’s second term in the White House. (On Wednesday, GEO Group was “the single biggest winner in the U.S. stock market — among companies of any size,” according to the investment news site Sherwood News, which is owned by Robinhood.)

On the earnings calls, two of the largest players in the private prison industry ― GEO Group and Core Civic ― demonstrated broad agreement on the implications of a second Trump term, saying it was likely to increase government funding of private contracts for immigration detention, electronic tracking devices, and the transport of detainees within the United States and to other countries.

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s– country’s history, and the opportunity that it will bring,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman of the company’s board of directors, said on the call. (The company used to be called Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.)

Elsewhere in the call, he referred to a potential “sea change” in interior and border enforcement ― an “unprecedented opportunity” to assist with what he described as the “much more aggressive” policy framework from the incoming Trump administration. Speaking generally, he said, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”

“It feels like with this election this year, we’re heading into an era that we really haven’t seen, maybe only once or twice in the company’s history, where the value proposition of the private sector for both our state partners and our federal partners are going to be not only strong today, but even stronger as we go in the next couple of years,” Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, said on that company’s own earnings call. Hininger noted he’d been with the company over 32 years. “We do think that there’s going to be increased need for detention capacity,” he added later.

Trump’s effort to pursue widespread immigration detention during his first term ran up against a shortage of bed space ― a situation that private vendors seemed eager to address.

Referring to a proposed Republican spending bill earlier this year that would have funded 50,000 beds in immigration detention, Hininger said that figure now “feels to be a floor, especially with Republicans now going to control both the Senate and likely the House.” He referred to press reports suggesting a “much higher level” of potential detention capacity, and said the company was working on a plan to make “every single bed that we’ve got in the enterprise” available for use. Zoley said GEO Group was “well-positioned” to scale up from its current 13,500 ICE detention beds to “over 31,000 beds.”

He separately noted that other contracts with federal, state and local governments cover 85,000 beds, and that the company could redirect those contracts toward these federal purposes. There will likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said later, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Zoley also referred to the potential for “the need for some soft-sided facilities around the country” to jail “lower”-security detainees.

Trump hasn’t discussed the logistical details of his mass deportation proposal. On Thursday, he said that “there is no price tag” for it, and he previously insisted in one interview that massive camps wouldn’t be needed because “we’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it.” But Stephen Miller, a key immigration advisor, has said otherwise, calling for “massive staging facilities” because, as he put it to Charlie Kirk last year, “If a deportation team goes to a particular house and arrests an illegal alien family — so, say, a mother, a father and four children — there’s not just a plane on a tarmac that’s 10 minutes away ready to take them.”

Responding to a question about the difference between detaining people who’ve just crossed the border, and people who are in deportation proceedings beginning in the interior of the country, Zoley emphasized that private jails would be necessary.

“I’ve been told recently [that it will take] several weeks if not a few months to detain these people and make final arrangements for their removal,” he said. GEO Group didn’t respond to questions about who “told” him that.

And Hininger referred to the potential need for investment in some facilities to increase their “intake” capacity, depending on the pace of deportations.

“We may have a facility that is designed for 50-100 [detainees] coming into the facility on a regular basis, and that needs to go up to 200 or 300, so we may have to make some tweaks there with the physical plan,” he said.

Both calls also extensively discussed the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or “ISAP.” Otherwise known as “alternatives to detention,” it employs surveillance, like ankle monitors or cellphone tracking apps, to keep tabs on people with immigration cases without necessarily jailing them.

GEO Group CEO Brian Evans said the program currently has around 182,500 participants, but that his company had the capacity to increase its contract to “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary.” Other participants in the call used similar language.

“We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more expansive approach to monitoring the several millions of individuals who are currently on the non-detained immigrant docket,” GEO Group President and COO Wayne Calabrese also said on the call. “We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals, in order to achieve the federal government’s immigration law compliance objectives.”

Zoley noted the program once reached 340,000 participants, and that “we’re looking at, potentially, a doubling or tripling of the ISAP program.” Republicans in the House, he noted, this year proposed a bill that would require all 7 million people on the non-detained immigration docket “be under some form of electronic monitoring.” Higher-security individuals would likely need ankle monitors, he said, but others would suffice with simple electronic devices, which “are not capital intensive, and could be made readily available quickly at a very low cost.”

GEO Group is currently the sole contractor for the program, but Core Civic has its eye on a slice of the pie as well, noting in its call that just yesterday, ICE posted what’s known as an RFI, or “request for information,” related to the ISAP program ― a precursor to a potential request for contract proposals down the line ― as well as a “a virtual industry briefing” scheduled for Dec. 2.

The timing of the RFI, Hininger said, was “probably not a coincidence.”

“We took that as a very encouraging sign ― and to be honest with you, [it’s] pretty consistent with what we’ve heard from ICE here recently, where they were thinking about engaging multiple partners,” he added.

Spokespeople for ICE and DHS did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Then there’s transportation ― the actual movement of detainees between ICE facilities, and eventually, their flights out of the country.

Evans said on the GEO Group call that transport was “increasingly” part of the company’s ICE portfolio, with a subcontract for air services “expected to generate approximately $25 million dollars in annualized revenues.”

But with Trump incoming, that could be just the start, he said.

“We believe we have the capabilities to expand the provision of these services to assist ICE in moving several hundreds of thousands of additional individuals if needed.”