Private Prisons and ICE Exploit Loopholes, Harm Communities

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorizes Black and brown communities with racial profiling, kidnappings, inhumane treatment, fatal abuse, and killings, private prison investors are asking how ICE can detain more people to increase their profits. Private prison corporations have long profited from immigration enforcement, but they are expecting a financial windfall under the current administration. These corporations are politically and financially situated to rapidly increase detention capacity and cash in on the president’s goal of deporting one million people per year. Stopping these corporations from lining politicians’ campaign coffers is a necessary first step in ensuring that our government is accountable to the people it serves, rather than the corporations it contracts with.

ICE and private prison corporations have long had a symbiotic relationship. Ninety percent of ICE's detainees were already being held in facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations before President Trump began his second term. CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the largest private prison corporations that lead the multi-billion dollar industry, have been contracting with immigration enforcement for decades. By 2023, ICE contracts accounted for 43 percent of CoreCivic’s revenue and 30 percent of GEO Group’s revenue. The majority of each corporation’s lobbyists have held government positions, and GEO Group’s board of directors “has extensive links with ICE.” The relationship between private prisons and ICE is the embodiment of the “'revolving door’ between the federal government and the private sector.”

These private prison corporations have donated millions to the current administration to advance their own interests. CoreCivic and GEO Group spent $1.77 million and $1.38 million, respectively, lobbying the federal government in 2024. These corporations and the people that run them spent millions more in contributions to candidates and PACs that same year. While corporations that contract with the federal government are technically barred from making such direct political contributions, legal loopholes permit CoreCivic and GEO Group’s “PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate family members” to make such political contributions.

It should come as no surprise, then, that since Trump's second term began, CoreCivic and GEO Group have secured additional lucrative government contracts with ICE, enjoyed soaring profits, and seen their stocks rise. These companies are directly profiting from the administration’s racist immigration agenda and its dismantling of due process. Reporters last year found that CoreCivic made $116.5 million in profits in 2025, “an almost 70 percent increase from the previous year.” The company expects higher profits in 2026 to the tune of $147.5 million to $157.5 million.

This projected growth aligns with CoreCivic and GEO Group’s successful lobbying in connection with H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, to increase Congress’s appropriations to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “Much of [the] focus” of CoreCivic and GEO Group’s 2024 lobbying was on DHS appropriations. When Congress passed H.R. 1 in 2025, adding $75 billion over four years to ICE’s base $10 billion budget, ICE became the highest-funded law enforcement agency in America.

Nearly two-thirds of the H.R. 1 budget allocated to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is dedicated to building detention facilities capable of detaining more than 100,000 people per year, while the remaining third is intended to increase ICE’s capacity through hiring and training new officers. This is just one slice of the more than $170 billion that H.R. 1 allocated for immigration enforcement.

In a similar vein, in June of 2026, Congress passed legislation to pump nearly $70 billion more into ICE and CBP’s already inflated budget over the next three years. Almost 90 percent of that additional funding is intended to increase ICE and CBP’s detention efforts and capacity, and fund improvements to their technological capabilities.

ICE’s enormous budget is expected to benefit CoreCivic and GEO Group by allowing them to reopen their idle facilities and construct new ones in record time. The American Immigration Council estimates that with the funding from H.R.1, “ICE could potentially acquire enough detention beds to house 135,000 people at any given time, more than three times the entire capacity of the system at the time President Trump took office.” This expansion has grave implications for noncitizens and citizens alike, as more and more people are subject to ICE detention and inhumane conditions in these facilities.

The stakes of ICE's expansion are, unsurprisingly, highest for Black and brown people. While the government does not publish race and ethnicity data concerning the people it detains, ICE has made no secret of its blatant racial profiling. In one particularly egregious example, in DHS’s 2025 national media campaign, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was depicted on camera saying, “if you are here illegally, you’re next,” while mugshot-style photos of Black and brown men were shown in the background. DHS’ Operation Metro Surge, which terrorized communities in Minnesota beginning in December 2025, targeted Somali and Latino residents. This dovetails with the United States’ history of disproportionately policing and incarcerating Black and brown people. The big money supporting the expansion of ICE treats the capture and abuse of Black and brown people as a business demanding more infrastructure, systems, and technology.

Private prisons are not the only type of corporate interest that profits from ICE terrorizing Black and brown people. The government also has lucrative contracts with hundreds of companies that provide everything from “surveillance tech and airline transportation to cloud services and bank financing.” ICE’s top ten contractors have benefited the most, as ICE concentrated nearly 70 percent of its spending on those contractors in the first full year of this administration. The best-known of these contractors is perhaps Palantir, a tech surveillance company that spent $5.9 million on lobbying expenses in 2024. And while top Palantir executives’ ideological views align with the current administration’s white supremacist rhetoric, and that ideology no doubt informs their business, Palantir’s sheer financial benefits are undeniable. In April of 2025, DHS signed a $30 million contract with Palantir to develop more comprehensive migrant tracking systems, and in February of 2026, Palantir secured a $1 billion software purchase agreement with DHS.

These corporations have a vested interest in ICE’s expansion and in its violent detention practices – that interest is in direct conflict with the will of voters. Polling shows that ICE’s unpopularity has increased. A “sizeable majority” (over 60 percent) of voters believe that ICE has “gone too far” and is “making Americans less safe.” Big money in politics has drowned out public opinion thus far, however. The political influence of private prison corporations and other corporate interests has led to a “Deportation-Industrial Complex,” which the Brennan Center for Justice describes as “an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration.” The financial and political power of this enforcement machine far exceeds that of everyday voters. For example, when H.R. 1 increased ICE’s budget sevenfold, it bypassed the normal discretionary appropriations process, which typically funds defense and immigration. ICE has access to its new, incredibly large budget, whether or not Congress passes its annual budget. As a result, ICE continued to operate while the government was partially shut down in early 2026, even though the shutdown was intended to put pressure on lawmakers to overhaul ICE’s practices after the agency killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

As long as private prisons and similar corporate interests profit from ICE’s harm to Black and brown people, and as long as they can use legal loopholes to make unchecked political contributions to support ICE’s terror, the government will prioritize their interests. In the meantime, ICE continues to racially profile, harm people with impunity, and keep detention center conditions deplorable. The administration also continues to ensure that there is a large pool of people for ICE to target, pausing processing of green card applications and keeping pathways to citizenship scarce.

A thriving democracy cannot allow these monied interests to dictate immigration policy and prioritize profits over people. A critical step in reducing the outsized political power of private prisons is for Congress to enact legislation that closes legal loopholes and strictly limits political donations from government contractors’ direct associates, such as PACs, corporate executives, and major shareholders. Banning these contributions would go a long way toward severing the financial ties that currently allow corporate interests to co-opt our democracy and influence immigration policy. Other campaign finance reforms, such as stricter disclosure requirements and conflicts-of-interest laws, are also necessary to rein in the inordinate role of money in politics. Such measures will help reduce pay-to-play incentives that currently enable private prison corporations and ICE to turn a hefty profit by terrorizing Black and brown people and harming our communities.

Joshua Harmon is a Research and Data Analytics Senior Associate at Dēmos, a non-profit public policy organization working to build a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy and economy.

Neda Khoshkhoo is Interim Director of Democracy at Dēmos, where she focuses on crafting policy solutions for democratic reform, racial justice, and immigrant justice.