- August 5, 2025
Trump’s mass deportations have one big winner: the private prison industry
A recent Gallup poll found that only 30% of Americans now want immigration reduced, a sharp drop from 55% a year ago. Even more striking, a record 79% now say immigration is good for the country.
Yet, in stark contrast to the public mood, Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful law will allocate a record $170 billion for immigration enforcement.
To put this in perspective, it’s more than the combined budgets of the FBI (estimated at $11 billion a year) and the CIA (estimated at $15 billion a year.) In effect, the Trump administration will now spend more to detain undocumented immigrants than to catch child predators or terrorists.
The Big Beautiful law’s immigration budget includes $45 billion in funds to build new “detention centers” — critics call them concentration camps — for immigrants over the next four years. In addition, several states are earmarking their own funds to build immigrant prisons like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Critics call this immigration enforcement budget the biggest windfall for the “private prison industrial complex” in recent memory.
As Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) argued in ElPasoMatters.org on June 30, the Big Beautiful law’s immigration provisions “do nothing to ‘secure the border’ but will use your money to enrich the corporations profiting off mass deportations.”
She added: “The people being targeted are not ‘the worst of the worst.’ They are the workforce that took care of Americans during COVID, help fuel the hospitality industry, are part of the care economy and do back-breaking labor in the fields under the hot sun.”
Indeed, a recent study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 93% of the 205,000 people detained by ICE since October had no record of violence, and 65% had no criminal convictions at all.
Lauren-Brook Eisen, senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and author of several books on private prisons, told me the surge in funding for Trump’s immigration crackdown is “incredibly troubling” on several fronts.
This new law, she warned, creates “a system of mass detentions” that will be very hard to dismantle after Trump leaves office.
Giant private prison corporations — and their contractors for transportation, health and food supply, among others — will have a vested interest in lobbying for continuing mass deportations, even if that hurts the U.S. economy or creates humanitarian crises.
In addition, the Trump administration has virtually dismantled two key offices in the Department of Homeland Security: the Office of the Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Both were tasked with safeguarding against human rights abuses in the U.S. prison system.
“These offices have been shuttered,” Eisen said. “They performed critical oversight of detention facilities.”
Meanwhile, the stocks of major private prison companies such as the Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee’s Core Civic, have skyrocketed since Trump’s second-term election.
GEO Group’s stock increased by 61% and CoreCivic’s by 41% since early November 2024. By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose just 7% over the same period.
Some of the big private prison companies have also expanded in recent years into selling digital surveillance tools — including ankle monitors and tracking apps — to the U.S. government for use on undocumented detainees.
Unsurprisingly, private prison firms are having a field day. GEO Group’s CEO Executive Chairman George C. Zoley reportedly said in a conference call earlier this year, referring to the pace of new contracts, that, “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” The New York Times reported in March.
With public opposition to the cruelty and economic foolishness of Trump’s mass deportations mounting, as the Gallup survey showed, it’s time for sensible lawmakers in Congress to demand far greater oversight over America’s private prison industrial complex.
Otherwise, Americans may soon find themselves at the mercy of unaccountable corporate jailers. We risk creating a monster that will be difficult to tame, even after Trump’s eventual exit.