The 2025 Reconciliation Bill Allows Private Prison Execs to Cash In on Cruelty

Following months of rhetoric around mass deportations and detention, President Trump’s win in the 2024 elections signaled to private prison executives and investors that they were about to see their businesses boom. This is because roughly 90 percent of the total population in immigration detention are held in facilities operated by private, for-profit companies. According to the CEO of CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison corporations in the country, their “business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment.”

To usher in this era of mass detention, private prison companies donated over 1 million dollars to Trump’s reelection campaign. In the days following the 2024 election, the two main juggernauts behind private immigration detention, including CoreCivic, saw their stock prices jump up by roughly 75 percent.

If a second Trump administration was good for private prison companies, H.R. 1 – the massive spending bill passed in July 2025 referred to by many as “the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” – was a gold rush. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget quadrupled when H.R. 1 was signed into law, adding nearly $11.25 billion to the agency’s coffers every year through 2029. As the number of people in immigration detention skyrockets, companies are boasting about record profits and investments from their shareholders.

Private prison corporations already manage the top 20 detention facilities (by average daily population rate) in the country, but H.R. 1 is fueling a massive expansion. Not even a record-long government shutdown could slow down their financial growth. Meanwhile, Congress gutted funding for social services and health care so that private prison executives could line their pockets.

In the second post in our “They Traded Care for Cages” series, we’ll dive deeper into the harms of H.R. 1 to discuss how the private prison industry is cashing in on human rights abuses.

How did the Private Prison Industry Capture the Detention Business?

In 1984, the United States signed a contract with the Correctional Corporation of America, one of the first modern contracts for a privately operated immigration detention center. CCA has since rebranded: they are now CoreCivic, with a net worth of $1.7 billion.

Since then, the private prison industry has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry led by CoreCivic and another titan, GEO Group. For decades, their facilities have been sites of death and abuse. Initially, these corporations profited off of the Reagan administration’s racist and punitive policy agenda of mass incarceration through the criminal legal system. As time went on, “law and order” laws and policies that disproportionately target Black and Brown communities for imprisonment were accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the immigration detention system. Private prison companies knew a profit opportunity when they saw it.

It is critical to note that privatized immigration detention is a bipartisan problem. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order eliminating the use of federally owned private prisons. However, this order was silent on privately run immigration detention facilities. This left a legal loophole that private prison companies exploited, creating greater financial opportunities for themselves and grave human rights concerns for immigrant communities and immigration advocates.

For example, following the issuance of Biden’s executive order, GEO Group wasted almost no time in re-opening the Moshannon Valley Processing Center as an immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania after it was closed as a private jail. Moshannon is now the largest immigration facility in the Northeast, and GEO Group is cashing a massive paycheck for its operation: experts at Temple University have put the corporation’s earnings at around $3.4 million each month.

Other prisons followed their example, and the percentage of those held in private detention facilities jumped from 80 percent to 90 percent within the first three years of the Biden administration.

The human toll of this expansion has been extreme. In August of this year, Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old man who had been living in Flushing, Queens, was found in the shower with a noose around his neck while detained at Moshannon. His hands and feet were hog-tied in linens. The very next day, GEO Group shared a report on their Q2 earnings and developments. They cited “unprecedented growth opportunities.” Mr. Ge, who died under their care, was not mentioned, and ICE’s official press statement spent more time talking about how and why he was arrested than his actual death.

Why Does the Government Use Private Prisons for Immigration Detention?

Using private prisons allows the government to pass the day-to-day responsibilities of keeping immigrants in detention to others. Through these contracts, private prison companies become responsible for providing staffing, maintaining standards set by ICE, and subcontracting with vendors for services like food and medical care. A revolving door between ICE leadership and the private prison executive suite further solidifies this “partnership.”

In addition to direct contracting between ICE and private prison companies, ICE often uses localities as middlemen through Inter-Governmental Service Agreements. These are technically agreements between ICE and local governments but ultimately benefit private corporations. IGSAs allow a local or county prison to rent out prison beds to ICE for detaining immigrants. Under this kickback scheme, the locality receives a small cut of the contract’s profits while the rest goes straight to the private prison company that operates the prison. The Trump administration recently reopened the family detention center in Dilley, Texas using this model, despite a history of abuse and vocal opposition from child health experts.

The only goal of a private corporation is to maximize profits to benefit their shareholders. Their business model is dependent on a steady stream of detained people – and cutting costs elsewhere. These shortcuts all lead to an inevitable cycle where basic standards of care and contractual requirements are violated, with no end in sight.

For example, overcrowding in facilities leads to serious public health consequences for people trapped inside cells. In April 2025, there were 45 facilities operating over their contracted capacity. Nearly 30 percent were operated by private contractors. The Krome North Service Processing Center, owned by a private security corporation, topped the list. It was 295 percent over capacity, meaning that 1,806 people were held in a place that was supposed to provide services for 611. As a result, human rights monitors and advocates report shocking conditions: one advocate observed that “People are not able to take showers, not able to access phones, not able to contact attorneys, or get medical help, all exacerbated by overcrowding.”

A recent lawsuit filed by people detained at CoreCivic’s California City Immigration Processing Center reports “decrepit” and “punishing” conditions, including egregious medical neglect, three attempted suicides, a lack of access to counsel, bug infestations, and inedible food. The California City filing joins roughly 100 lawsuits that have been filed against CoreCivic this year alone. These suits allege a host of human rights abuses, including civil rights violations, physical and sexual assault, and failure to protect inmates from harm.

Private prison operators have also forced detained people to work in the facilities – cooking and cleaning the facilities for as little as $1 a day or even without payment – under the threat of retaliation, harassment, and solitary confinement.

Why Does Abuse Continue in Private Prisons?

These corporations are able to sweep issues like overcrowding and inhumane conditions under the rug because they have even less accountability to the public and the federal government than ICE-run sites. The contracts that private corporations sign with ICE usually require that the site complies with ICE’s national detention standards. However, private prison corporations are able to obtain waivers from ICE – who regularly approves them – that exempts their facilities from complying with federal performance standards.

In one case in 2013, Immigration Centers of America (ICA), a small private prison contractor, received a waiver that exempted their Farmville, Virginia facility from needing to meet a standard number of toilets. Citing how expensive it would be ($404,000) to install more toilets, ICA essentially got permission from ICE to fail personal hygiene standards. Over the years Farmville has changed hands from one private corporation to another, but it remains a lightning rod for reports of abuse and negligence.

When Private Wealth is More Important Than Human Rights

Despite countless lawsuits and decades of recorded abuse, these corporations keep raking in millions of dollars in federal contracts as the Trump administration wages its war on immigrants. In their latest earnings call, CoreCivic announced $580.4 million in profits. David Garfinkle, CoreCivic’s executive vice president and CFO, named H.R. 1 as a direct contributor to their record (and predicted) growth: “With historic funding levels for border security and immigration detention obtained under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act…we believe there are numerous opportunities to activate additional idle facilities we own.”

GEO Group also announced that they secured record-breaking revenue: $460 million from either new or expanded contracts, the most business the company has ever received. Adelanto ICE Processing Center, once the subject of a 2018 Office of the Inspector General Management Alert, brought GEO Group’s total detention capacity to a record 22,000 this year.

Other companies like Acquisition Logistics LLC and LaSalle Corrections have also received massive contracts from H.R. 1 funding. While the web of private detention is immense and always growing, we know of proposed or existing activations in at least California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas since the signing of H.R. 1.

Companies should not be able to capitalize off putting people in cages. Where executives see dollar signs, and the Trump administration sees its vision of 100,000 filled immigration detention “beds” realized, we see human rights violations. Though immigration detention is one tentacle of the larger monster that is the prison-industrial complex, the United States must urgently stop the use of private immigration detention facilities, end mandatory detention, and turn to the work of phasing out the use of immigration detention altogether.

Otherwise, the unprecedented amount of funding directed towards expanding immigration detention in H.R. 1 means that corporate executives will continue to make millions while detained people like Mr. Ge in Moshannon lose their lives.