This article is published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy.
On an August 7 earnings call, Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, announced that the country’s largest private prison operator “is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment … We are in an unprecedented environment with rapid increases in federal detention populations nationwide and a continuing need for solutions.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has delivered massive profits for private prison operators, with CoreCivic reporting an 18 percent revenue growth year over year for the third quarter, and GEO Group, the largest contractor working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), boasting record-breaking third-quarter earnings up 13 percent over the same period last year.
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But while much of the rapid growth of both GEO and CoreCivic is tied to Trump’s immigration detention policies, these companies also rely on existing lucrative revenue streams from state and local communities. Whether it’s Vermont shipping prisoners to a CoreCivic facility in Mississippi or California using a historic LGBT gathering space for a GEO Group re-entry facility in San Francisco, a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) review reveals that the architecture the Trump administration is using for its broad-based crackdown on immigrants relies on a pre-existing infrastructure: a privatized prison system built with the support of both political parties, much of it developed and implemented at the local level.
In its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GEO Group discloses that only 62 percent of its 2024 revenue came from the federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE, and the U.S. Marshals Service. Last year, CoreCivic earned just 51 percent of its revenue from the same sources. Both companies rely on state and local governments and other federal agencies for their remaining revenue.
The fact that many state and local governments often put the profits of private investors above best practices for rehabilitation and re-entry has helped create the infrastructure for the Trump administration’s often lawless crackdown, according to prison reform advocates. But since many of these contracts with state and local governments include quick termination clauses, activists have the power to make a meaningful impact on the bottom line of these prison companies.
“Any state leadership that takes issue with what the administration is currently doing in terms of immigration detention—as enabled by the private prison industry—[has a duty to look] at ways to cut ties with the industry entirely,” notes Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, which advocates for dismantling the private prison complex.
“Whether it’s helping with corrections management or … with re-entry services … [these companies] have shown their cards as to who they are and really should have no role [with ICE or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)] at all,” Tylek told CMD. “There’s no doubt that this industry is facilitating and enabling the rapid arrests, detention, and deportation of undocumented people, [along with] the harassment of communities of color, whether they are citizens or not.”
Both before the current immigration crackdown and since the beginning of this year, GEO Group and CoreCivic have been called out for widespread human rights violations at their immigration detention centers. Just this month, immigrant detainees in California sued ICE over conditions at a CoreCivic facility near Bakersfield, alleging it is riddled with insect infestations and sewage problems, and that they were denied access to water, food, and attorneys. This month, immigration detention inmates and their advocates in Louisiana alleged denial of medical care and inhumane overcrowding. In 2024, detained immigrants sued GEO over alleged widespread sexual abuse at a facility in California, and the Department of Justice opened an investigation into CoreCivic for an alleged culture of physical violence and sexual abuse at a private prison in Tennessee.
Blue-State Private Prison Contracts
Despite passing a law in 2019 to ban private prisons, California approved a new ten-year, $70 million contract with CoreCivic in 2024 for “re-entry services.” In addition, the state has multiyear contracts with GEO for over $300 million, for the same purpose, according to documents obtained by CMD through open records requests. Re-entry services refers to the process of reintegrating people in the criminal justice system or drug and alcohol treatment networks into mainstream society. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in October that bars California from enforcing the law against federally contracted immigration detention centers for now.
In July, a resident at a GEO Group facility in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco fled the facility and died, leading the city’s District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood to call for an investigation, while human rights advocates called for closing the facility entirely.
In Arizona, which has a Democratic governor (Katie Hobbs) and a Democratic attorney general (Kris Mayes), nearly 3,000 inmates are sent to CoreCivic’s La Palma Correctional Center and more than 2,000 inmates are at its Red Rock Correctional Facility. Six inmates have died at these facilities this year alone.
In addition, Arizona recently sold a prison to Management & Training Corporation, which also detains people for ICE, for $15 million. Arizona also outsources the operation of four state prisons to GEO Group: the Central Arizona Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility and Florence West Correctional and Rehabilitation, both in Florence; Kingman Correctional in Kingman; and Phoenix West in Phoenix—for a total of 6,000 beds.
In Colorado, where Democrats control both houses of the legislature and every statewide office, the state has two major contracts with CoreCivic for a total of over 3,000 beds at the Bent County Correctional Facility in Las Animas and the Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs. CoreCivic also operates “community treatment centers” for Democratic-controlled Boulder, Adams, and Arapahoe Counties in Colorado. Arapahoe County outsources a 202-bed “residential center” to GEO Group, and the state has two GEO Group “day reporting centers.” CoreCivic is represented by the lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, whose chairman Norm Brownstein is “close” to Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.
Vermont, which has a moderate Republican governor (Phil Scott) and a Democratic majority in the legislature, ships 250 of its inmates to a CoreCivic facility in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. In addition, the state has established itself as a center for reinsurance and captive insurance companies, and hosts GEO Group’s captive insurance subsidiary, Florina, which is set up to help reduce liability insurance costs for the company.
In Pennsylvania, which has a Democratic governor (Josh Shapiro) and a Democratic House, the state outsources a 142-bed “community corrections” facility in Chester County, along with a similar 100-bed facility in Scranton and a drug and alcohol treatment center in Reading, to GEO Group. The state also contracts with GEO to operate six “day reporting centers” with state and county authorities.
New Mexico has long been at the forefront of prison privatization, which began in earnest under libertarian former Gov. Gary Johnson, who was a Republican at the time. However, despite the fact that Democrats have controlled every statewide office and the legislature for the past seven years, New Mexico signed a new lease to rent the 596-bed Northwest New Mexico Corrections Center from CoreCivic in 2021. In addition, GEO Group runs two “community corrections” facilities for the state.
Democratic-controlled jurisdictions in red states also contract with CoreCivic and GEO Group. For example, Hinds County, Mississippi (home to Jackson), and Harris County, Texas (Houston), send inmates to a CoreCivic facility in Tallahatchie, Mississippi.
“This is an industry that has celebrated the Trump crackdown on immigrants as basically fundamental to the conditions they need in order to succeed,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, told CMD. “What I wouldn’t want people to miss is that, yes, the current administration is massively expanding the system even more, but they’re doing it on top of an infrastructure that has been [built] by both parties. GEO and CoreCivic have played a big role in that, both in their relationship with ICE and DHS, but also with their contracts with local governments.”
“This expansion of the system has gone through both parties,” Ghandehari reiterates. “The companies are in this to make a lot of money—[and] they’re excited to be cashing in [given that] 90 percent of people in ICE detention are in private facilities. Trump and [DHS Secretary Kristi] Noem couldn’t follow through [on their crackdown] without private prison companies. Right now, that’s where a lot of the leverage is, pressuring state and local governments not to enter into these agreements with private prison firms.”
Contracts with these firms could be ended quickly, according to the disclosures obtained by CMD. GEO Group’s SEC filing states that its “facility management contracts typically allow a contracting governmental agency to terminate a contract with or without cause at any time by giving us written notice ranging from 30 to 180 days.” CoreCivic’s filing states that most of its facility contracts “also contain clauses that allow the government agency to terminate the contract at any time without cause.”