Private prisons prepare for boom under Trump administration's deportation policy

Private prisons are expecting that business will be booming when President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated and begins his program of mass deportations. The illegal immigrants won’t be flying home the second they are arrested and will have to be detained somewhere.

“This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity,” George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, a private prison company, told his investors right after Trump was elected, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The scale of the looming deportations is mind-boggling. At a Turning Point USA conference Sunday in Phoenix, incoming Border Czar Tom Homan estimated that the Biden administration alone had allowed eight million illegal immigrants into the US. Homan has already acknowledged the depth and the breadth of the task ahead as he has pledged to move Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) desk officers into the field and promised to start deporting “public safety threats, national security threats and fugitives” first.

ICE deported 935,000 during the first Trump era. The Biden administration has removed 545,000. But the illegal immigration that necessitates deportation shrunk under Trump. Homan told CNN that ICE intends to detain a minimum of 100,000 illegal immigrants at a time, per The WSJ.

The American Immigration Council, no friend of Trump’s deportation plan, has claimed that the cost of deporting one million people a year will amount to $88 billion – an estimate that accounts for arresting, detaining, processing and removing illegal immigrants. GEO is responsible for detaining about 40 percent of ICE arrests. They expect to double that number during mass deportations.

Zoley said GEO can adapt quickly to a surge of detainees by upping its vacancy level from 13,500 to more than 31,000. The extra beds would mean revenue for the company would exceed $400 million per annum. GEO can also assist in transporting the migrants.

GEO subsidiary BI Incorporated is also responsible for electronically monitoring illegal immigrants before they appear in court. “We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions, of individuals,” said Wayne Calabrese, president and chief operating officer.

CoreCivic is another source of detention facilities for ICE and has also promised the stockholders that business will be good under the Trump administration. The company is optimistic that it can increase the number of beds available to 25,000 by opening up unused facilities like one in Dilley, TX that the Biden administration shut down but that CoreCivic is prepared to open again if required.