America’s two biggest private prison companies have made even more money from Trump’s mass deportation campaign than executives’ wildest hopes. In second-quarter earnings calls this week, executives at both GEO Group and CoreCivic announced revenue increases of over 100 percent compared to the same period last year, described buybacks of millions of dollars’ worth of stock, and outlined plans for the day after Trump achieves his goal of deporting one million immigrants this year, which they paradoxically expect will net even bigger piles of cash. Both revised their outlook for the rest of the year upwards.
At GEO Group, the largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), executives reported total revenue for the period of $636.2 million, about a 5 percent increase from the second quarter of 2024. Net income was $29.1 million for the period, compared to a net loss of $32.5 million last year. The company will buy back $300 million in company stock, executives announced, a maneuver companies perform to boost their share price higher when they have excess cash on hand or their stock is already on the rise.
There are “unprecedented growth opportunities in front of our company,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman of the board, said on his company’s earnings call Wednesday.
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CoreCivic had a similar story. Total revenue was $538.2 million, a nearly 10 percent increase from the second quarter last year, executives said on their earnings call the next day. Net income was $38.5 million, compared with $19.0 million a year ago. They, too, are in the midst of a stock buyback spree, with permission from the board to repurchase $500 million worth of outstanding shares.
“We’ve had a tremendous, tremendous second quarter,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger. “We’re gonna have a very strong year.”
Executives at both companies have been delighting at their prospects for the Trump presidency since before the inauguration. In February, Hininger called the Trump term “one of the most exciting periods in my career.”
There was high praise for the administration’s deadly spending bill, which cut Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, and other federal services for the needy while giving tax breaks to the richest people in the country. The Big Beautiful Bill also tripled the base budget for ICE and allocated $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers.
In an example of how fortunes have changed for private prison firms in the Trump era, Bank of America recently took back CoreCivic as a client after it cut loose the company in 2019.
Some of the people who will benefit the most from the immigration terror campaign windfall are previous members of ICE.
Even before the bill had passed, the Trump administration had given the GEO Group and CoreCivic a combined nine new contracts or expanded existing ones. After the spending law, both companies said they could reopen a combined 14 buildings that are currently unused.
GEO Group, for example, has approximately 5,900 “idle high-security beds that remain available” for ICE or the U.S. Marshals Service, and which could bring in another $310 million. Zoley said that the company has further “identified several of our existing ICE facilities where we could add approximately 5,000 combined beds either through temporary or permanent facility expansions.”
ICE is expanding its detention capacity “to 100,000 beds or more by the end of the year,” Zoley said. In response to an analyst’s question, he said that in order to fulfill the goal of deporting one million people, “You’d need 100,000 beds and you need to process those people in 30-day increments. So each month 100,000 people would be deported … to get to the one million. But that’s just a theoretical model.”
At some point soon, all the beds in those facilities will be filled, executives at both companies said. But there’s more money to be made after that, they assured investors. GEO Group executives see the opportunity in the form of shackling millions of undocumented people “so you know where they are and where they are in their process of going before a judge and making sure they get to that court hearing,” Zoley said.
GEO Group is the only provider of electronic monitoring devices for ICE, among other tools of digital surveillance. It has stocked up on “several tens of thousands” of GPS tracking devices, Zoley said, so the company can “significantly and quickly respond to the eventual expansion of” the program to follow undocumented immigrants’ every move. There are 183,000 immigrants currently in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), which uses GPS tracking and other technology to monitor immigrants as an “alternative to detention.”
Zoley sees a shift from detention to digital surveillance through GPS tracking happening “once detention capacity is maximized by the end of the year.” He was confident that the company has secured “the necessary resources to significantly and quickly respond to the eventual expansion of ISAP.”
By Zoley’s estimation, the number available for ISAP could be many multiples higher, given that there is a “population of 17 million to 18 million illegal aliens currently estimated to be in the United States,” he said. “Our view remains that in addition to increased detention capacity, the enforcement of federal immigration laws could lead to an increase in GPS tracking for individuals on the non-detained docket.”
CoreCivic’s day-after strategy, meanwhile, is to “lean way far forward” into transportation services, CEO Damon Hininger said in an earnings call yesterday. Executives are investing five times what they normally would on buses and vans; they anticipate an America where local law enforcement will need them to “quickly pick them up from a local jail” and drive them to a facility elsewhere. Seventy percent of immigrants in detention were apprehended in the country’s interior, he said, adding that southern border crossings are “basically … closed down.”
Some of the people who will benefit the most from the immigration terror campaign windfall are previous members of ICE. As The Washington Post reported last week, the door between GEO Group and the federal prison system is revolving apace. Its coverage focused on so-called “border czar” Tom Homan’s appointment of “an old friend and former colleague,” David Venturella, to help him run Trump and adviser Stephen Miller’s mass deportations. But Venturella had just spent 12 years at GEO Group, drawing compensation of more than $6 million to run immigrant gulags. Homan himself “earned an undisclosed amount in fees” from GEO Group for consulting before joining the administration.
The Post story also mentions former ICE acting director Matthew Albence, who is GEO Group’s senior vice president of client relations, and notes that there are at least six other former ICE officials in GEO Group’s leadership. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, that roster includes members of the senior leadership. Julie Myers Wood, a GEO board director since 2014, was the head of ICE between January 2006 and November 2008, and is now the CEO of Guidepost Solutions, which has a consulting agreement with the GEO Group electronic monitoring device subsidiary, BI. Last year, she received $180,000 as part of the consulting agreement. Another board member, Lindsay Koren, was an attorney adviser to the chief immigration judge at the Department of Justice, where she worked between 2004 and 2007. And GEO Group’s senior vice president of contract administration, Daniel Ragsdale, worked at ICE between 1996 and 2017, disclosures show, most recently as its deputy director.
GEO Group is also a family affair, its most recent proxy statement shows. David Meehan, divisional vice president of business development for GEO Care, is Executive Chairman George Zoley’s son-in-law, drawing a paycheck last year of $599,667.
Zoley’s son, Chris Zoley, is the company’s director of business development. Last year, his compensation was $169,179.