The lucrative business of detention and deportation

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

While the Donald Trump administration intensifies and broadens its detention and deportation machinery, affecting even U.S. citizens and authorized immigrants, the lucrative business that federal immigration policy represents for private prison companies responsible for detaining, transporting, and monitoring those impacted does not go unnoticed.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that “from January to May, the government awarded 50% more to companies involved in immigration removals than last year.”

Two of the main private companies responsible for detention and deportation are the GEO Group and CoreCivic. Both have made generous donations to the Trump campaign as well as to inaugural events this past January. ABC News reported that GEO Group donated a million dollars to a political action committee (PAC) to elect Trump, while CoreCivic donated half a million dollars to the President’s inaugural events.

“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” seems to be the motto, and both companies have seen their profits and stock value rise dramatically. The administration requires more prison space to detain immigrants and an expedited process to get them out of the country, hence the importance of these two companies and the smaller ones that make up the network charged with implementing Trump’s plans.

BBC News wrote that “since Trump won the elections in November, GEO Group saw its stock value soar nearly 90% and CoreCivic around 50%.”

“CoreCivic, the second-largest carceral company in the country, which in 2024 had $2 billion in revenue, also projects an avalanche of new business with the Trump administration,” added the BBC.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, over the past decade, private prison companies have earned more than $13 billion in the lucrative detention and deportation business.

These businesses are not free of controversy for their poor treatment of migrants, and there have been reports of assault, sexual abuse, deaths, and medical negligence, among many other troubling situations.

The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) summarizes it like this: “The U.S. government spends more than $3 billion per year on the largest immigration detention apparatus in the world to detain and deport people who have been living in the United States for decades, or arrived recently seeking safety or a better life. The people who are detained suffer inhumane conditions and violations of their rights, like medical negligence, preventable deaths, punitive use of solitary confinement, the lack of procedural safeguards, obstruction of the access to legal assistance, and discriminatory and racist treatment.”

The Trump 2.0 administration has proved that their affinity for detaining and deporting the largest number of people possible is not only centered on undocumented people who recently arrived and have a criminal history, but on immigrants in the process of seeking asylum, those with regularized status, people who established themselves years ago in the United States, Dreamers, and students on visas, to name a few. Even citizens have fallen into Trump’s dragnet.

Various media outlets reported on Leonardo García Venegas, a U.S. citizen detained along with other construction workers during an ICE operation in Foley, Alabama. Although 25-year-old García Venegas told them he was a citizen and asked them to check his REAL ID, the agents told him his ID was fake, the young man told Telemundo.

For Trump, the businessman, immigrants, and even citizens who do not fit the MAGA racial profile about who a U.S. citizen are a mere transaction. With juicy detention, deportation, and monitoring contracts, he fills the coffers of the private prison companies who then donate to his campaign. Then, he follows through with his base on his promise of deportation.

The terror and misfortune of immigrants and citizens affected by the deportation machine is a lucrative business for Trump.

The original Spanish version is here.