As the Trump administration expands it gulag system for immigrant detention and deportation, the capitalists who own and manage the for-profit system of prisons and detention centers are as happy as they could be. That’s because they have already made hundreds of millions by imprisoning poor and working people here in the U.S. Now, with the rapid growth of immigrant detentions under Trump, they expect to make far more.
Privately run, for-profit prisons developed in the 1980s and expanded slowly throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Over that period two major corporate operators, CoreCivic (previously Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) and the GEO Group, became the largest and most profitable of the bunch. While they initially housed mostly domestic prisoners, today they and a handful of other private operators already house about 90% of all immigrant detainees.
Since 2016 they have donated large sums to Trump’s campaigns and have actively encouraged tough policies towards undocumented immigrants. Why? They know that if the government cracks down on immigrants, their detention center cells and beds will stay filled and the profits will flow.
On a recent call with stockholders, CoreCivic’s CEO Damon T. Hininger said that Trump’s attacks on immigrants had created an “unprecedented environment” in which “our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment.” He went on to say that “nationwide ICE detention populations were 57,861, the highest detention populations ever recorded by ICE, which has been our largest customer for over 10 years…We know the demand from ICE will increase.” He was particularly excited about the effects of the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he called “a pivotal moment for funding related to our industry.” ICE’s campaign to hire 10,000 employees is “very important for two reasons…One, it is another sign of the intensity of ICE behavior with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Two, this increase in law enforcement personnel will obviously raise the level of individuals arrested and the requirement for detention capacity.”
George Zoley, the Chairman of the GEO Group, was just as excited when he recently talked with his stockholders. He told them that “all of these efforts are aimed at placing our company in the best competitive position possible to pursue what we continue to believe are unprecedented growth opportunities as a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year long track record.” A participant in the question-and-answer session showed he was just as excited to see the money rolling in when he said, “congrats on the quarter and all the positive news…and the fantastic growth opportunities ahead of us.”
Translation: the federal government is going to give us lots and lots of money to expand our businesses and make more profits by destroying the lives and families of more and more immigrants!
It shouldn’t surprise us that big business makes lots of money from government contracts. Whether its Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or Peter Thiel’s and Alex Karp’s Palantir, or military contracts Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Northrup-Grumman, big corporations have always been tightly tied to the state. Even when they like to claim they’re being oppressed by government regulations, they also shape government to their liking and profit from huge government contracts.
Now as the U.S. state begins a massive attack on the lives of a large segment of the U.S. population, it shouldn’t surprise us that the capitalists are again right there, working hand in hand with the government to make their profits. And as usual, as the profits flood into the pockets of these capitalists, it is millions of human beings who will suffer.
