Private Prison Companies Profit from ICE Raids and Detention under Trump

Key points:

• Trump administration intensifies immigration enforcement, raising concerns about private prison corporations.
• Private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic profit from expanded detention system.
• Over 90 percent of ICE detainees are held in privately run facilities nationwide.

As the Trump administration intensifies immigration enforcement, Worth Rises Executive Director Bianca Tylek is raising alarms about the expanding role of private prison corporations in profiting from a sprawling detention system.

Tylek, a nationally recognized criminal justice and immigration advocate and author of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, described a dangerous convergence of profit motives and public policy that is driving the expansion of ICE raids and immigration detention.

In a recent interview with the Vanguard, Tylek explained that a number of private corporations, including industry giants like the GEO Group and CoreCivic, are capitalizing on a political environment they helped shape through direct financial support to former President Trump and affiliated political entities.

“We’re in an environment where a number of small companies, and I say small companies — they’re obviously big companies, but they’re not Fortune 500 companies — that were major donors to the Trump administration are capitalizing on the Trump administration’s policies,” Tylek said. “That was the whole idea. If they donated to this particular administration, they would be able to be rewarded with policies that support their bottom line.”

According to Tylek, those policies include expanded immigration enforcement, longer detention periods, and the reopening of previously closed facilities.

“Those are policies that send more people to prison or detention and for longer periods of time, or in the case of detention, allow them to just continue to keep those beds filled, reopen facilities that they had previously closed and churn out deportation swipes,” she said.

Tylek argued that private prison companies are not merely passive participants in the detention system but are central to its expansion.

“Private prisons are highly relying on immigration detention because fewer and fewer prison systems are using private prisons for their correctional debt,” she said. “They are reopening closed facilities and acquiring new facilities. And I wouldn’t be surprised at some point they also break ground on new facilities once they fill up all the ones that they currently have.”

She noted that over 90 percent of people detained by ICE are held in privately run facilities, making the private prison industry deeply embedded in the federal immigration detention system.

In addition to longstanding players in the prison industry, Tylek warned that dozens of new vendors are entering the immigration detention space, spurred by a $45 billion expansion backed by the Trump administration.

“Some of these have never bid in detention before. And we’re talking about vendors who are used to building tent cities for concerts and are now going to be potentially building tent cities for detention,” she said. “They’re not folks used to building things for people to live in. And so it’s really appalling.”

This influx of private contractors raises serious questions about safety and human rights, particularly in light of the administration’s claims that those detained pose serious threats.

“If that’s the case, why are we holding them in non-secure facilities?” Tylek said. “You’re kind of telling on yourself that this is not even remotely who you are aiming for if this is how you are building the facilities to hold them.”

Tylek said these lower-security facilities are no accident but part of a larger pattern by private prison companies that prioritize holding people who pose the least risk.

“They have historically always sought to hold people who have a minimum security status. And that’s because it’s cheaper and less risky to do so,” she said. “And so they charge the government egregious rates to hold some of the folks that present the smallest amount of risk to safety.”

She also pointed to recent data revealing that only 28 percent of people detained by ICE have any kind of criminal record, and most of those records involve nonviolent offenses.

“It is just a lie,” she said. “And they know it, because they’re building facilities not to hold people who have high security risks.”

Tylek added that due process violations are compounding the harm.

“If you really thought that they were that dangerous and the case was ironclad, you wouldn’t be cutting corners on due process and all sorts of other things,” she said.

Beyond the policy failures and financial exploitation, Tylek said the human costs of immigration detention are staggering.

“The separated families, the wailing children and partners, the people kidnapped off the streets, the business owners who are ironically losing employees, the communities that are losing pillars, the children who are losing parents, spouses losing spouses,” she said. “It is endless in terms of what we’re seeing.”

She warned that additional harms are happening behind the scenes, including physical abuse, poor medical care, and even deaths in transit.

“Recently there have now been deaths in not just custody in the facilities, but also in transportation — people who were healthy just days and weeks before,” Tylek said. “The true extent of the harm will become clearer over time, but it is going to be pretty extensive.”

When asked about the root causes and potential solutions, Tylek was clear that the problem goes beyond one administration.

“It’s not just administration change, because immigration detention is something that persisted under Democratic administrations just as much as it is here,” she said. “I think this particular administration chooses to take a particularly brutal and inhumane narrative and policy approach to all of this, but a lot of these deportations and things were happening beforehand.”

Tylek urged policymakers to take immigration reform seriously.

“Both parties need to seriously look at immigration policy and really come up with serious solutions,” she said. “No one’s serious about this issue right now — no one on the elected side. I think there are a lot of organizations that have put forward good policy plans to help people get status in a responsible way. And I think neither party is really seriously addressing the issue and laying out a policy plan that both supports our economy, our communities, and our families in a humane way.”

“It is truly embarrassing, I think, what our elected officials are doing,” she said.

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