What If Mass Deportation Isn't the Goal
ICE Detention Centers and the Reincarnation of Convict Leasing
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The United States Loves to Incarcerate People
This is more than an immigration and deportation story today. It is a story about how the United States has repeatedly used the machinery of the state to criminalize, control, and extract profit from marginalized communities. It is the story of how America never quite fully ended slavery; it just reinvents it in each era.
Trump is now reinventing it for the 21st century.
In the United States, we love to incarcerate people. We do a lot of it. We incarcerate more people proportionally than any other major country. Just look at the graph below comparing our incarceration rates with those of other NATO countries.
It’s not even close. You would think we have way more criminals in the US than any other country in the world, except that isn’t true; we mostly incarcerate those people we don’t like very much, and we do it for profit.
African Americans have suffered the brunt of this imprisonment fetish. One in five African Americans is incarcerated at some point in their lives. In comparison to Euro-Americans, African Americans are about five times more likely to be incarcerated (see chart below).
But that isn’t all….
We also don’t like Indigenous people too much. We have “incarcerated” them on poverty-stricken reservations for decades to sequester them from the general population. However, the proportion of Indigenous people in prison is second only to that of African Americans. Imagine that.
Do you see a pattern here? African Americans and Indigenous people do not commit crimes at any higher rate than Euro Americans, yet, they are incarcerated at many times the rate. Why do you think that is?
Extracting Labor for Free
The second unique feature of our incarceration industry is how it is increasingly privatized, economically incentivized, and commercialized. Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 90,873 people in private prisons in 2022, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.
That might not be an impressive percentage, but don’t worry…it is very, very lucrative. Overincarceration is directly related to the profit that it yields. And as we all know, profit is the real motto of the United States.
The US has a history of enslaving or incarcerating people of color and exploiting labor to maximize profit. That is the capitalist way…and we have become the wealthiest nation in the world using such tactics.
A study of private prison contracts by the Brennan Center for Justice found that “…the majority of these contracts guarantee that the state will supply enough prisoners to keep between 80 and 100 percent of the private prisons’ beds filled. If the state fails to fulfill this ‘bed guarantee’, it must pay a fine to the company running the prisons, in effect, paying for each prison bed regardless of whether it holds a prisoner.”
Ah, yes, your tax dollars at work.
Because governments are financially penalized when they do not meet or exceed the minimum occupancy requirements, governments are incentivized to arrest and incarcerate more and more people, preferably, people of color. By incorporating minimum occupancy clauses, private prison corporations reinforce mass incarceration through their contracts with governments.
This racket has been going on for many decades, even longer than the “law and order” days of the Reagan administration. It received a boost during the Clinton years with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It has continued unabated into the 21st century.
But it has a history earlier than the Reagan years. This has been going on under other names, such as slavery or convict leasing, as we will see shortly.
The US Is Investing $185 billion in the Immigration Detention Industry
What we are about to see is an expansion of the private prison industry with $185 billion in funding under the new Big Ugly Bill passed by Republicans despite its massive unpopularity. Much of this money will go to private companies that already provide many of the private prison beds in operation.
Two corporations, The GEO Group, Inc., and CoreCivic, Inc., manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US. These contracts are extremely lucrative. Targeting, criminalizing, and detaining Latino immigrants using ICE terrorist agents is the next profit center bonanza in the privatized incarceration industry that will be worth billions of dollars.
Cha’-Ching!
The proposed $185 billion budget under Trump for ICE expansion and detainment camps echoes the historical system of convict leasing used after the Civil War in disturbing and structural ways.
Five Ways ICE Detention Resembles Convict Leasing
Number One:
After slavery was abolished in 1865, Southern states, not willing to accept full citizenship rights of former enslaved people, criminalized minor infractions (like loitering or vagrancy) to arrest Black Americans and lease them to private companies (railroads, plantations, factories, and mines). States profited from these contracts, essentially replacing enslaved labor with prison labor. It was called “convict leasing.” Incarceration via convict leasing became economically beneficial to the state and private industry.
Today, the private prison industry and government contractors profit from the mass detention of immigrants. Companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic have already received multi-billion-dollar contracts to build and manage ICE detention centers. Immigration offenses, once civil offenses, have become criminalized, increasing detention centers, filling more beds, and fueling profits.
Both systems create financial incentives to incarcerate marginalized populations for economic gain.
Cha’-Ching.
Number Two:
Both the post-Civil War convict leasing system and ICE detentions target marginalized groups. They focus on those the government has decided are a threat, which, of course, means non-white people. Specifically, under convict leasing, they targeted newly freed African Americans under racist laws like the Black Codes and criminalized freedom for African Americans to maintain a racial caste system.
ICE detention targets immigrants, especially Latinos and asylum seekers from Central America and Africa, many of whom have no criminal records. Policies like "zero tolerance" criminalize border crossings to increase detentions.
You have to keep the beds full.
Number Three:
Both systems exploit legal loopholes to extract coerced labor from people under state control. In the Jim Crow era, the 13th Amendment Loophole allowed for convict leasing to flourish. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as “punishment for a crime.” Black codes made almost anything a crime if an African American was doing it. This clause allowed for convict leasing to flourish.
ICE detainees, as in convict leasing, are often made to work for as little as $1 a day or even for free in detention centers. Being declared “illegal” makes them vulnerable to arrest. It isn’t hard for companies to turn a major profit when they are paying workers less than 10 cents an hour. Legal challenges argue this violates human trafficking and labor laws, but the loopholes remain.
Number Four:
Once institutionalized, both systems become difficult to dismantle, serving as permanent machinery of racialized control. Convict leasing became foundational in Southern postwar economies and lasted for nearly 80 years after the Civil War. It paved the way for modern mass incarceration.
The ICE infrastructure expansion under Trump will entrench a massive deportation and detention apparatus. With funds from the Big Ugly Bill, Trump hopes to add up to 150,000 beds, most of which will be built privately. Even under subsequent administrations, dismantling the system will prove difficult due to its embedded contracts and scale.
Number Five:
There are human rights abuses, which are similar in both systems. Convict leasing saw extremely high death rates; workers were brutalized and expendable. In some cases, mass graves have been uncovered near factory sites in the South, indicating the high death rate associated with convict leasing.
Trump’s ICE detention centers already have reports of abuse, medical neglect, sexual assault, and family separation. Children are held in cages, and people are detained for indefinite periods without trial. Due process is simply ignored.
Trump's ICE budget is not a historical anomaly; it's a modern reincarnation of a racialized system that profits from captivity. Like convict leasing, it reveals how the machinery of the state can be weaponized to extract labor, suppress minorities, and enrich corporations under the guise of "law and order." And it is being done on the public dime.
What we are witnessing is not a departure from American tradition, but its evolution. From slave plantations to prison farms, from convict leasing to ICE detention centers, the United States has repeatedly turned captivity into an engine of economic profit.
CHA’-CHING!
Meet the Winners of the Mass Incarceration Program
So, who are these corporations that are reaping the benefits of state-sponsored incarceration and labor exploitation? The explosive growth of GEO Group and CoreCivic during the first Trump administration isn’t an accident; it’s the commercialization of captivity.
Just as convict leasing relied on state-sanctioned arrests to supply cheap labor, these companies rely on federal enforcement policies to fill beds and maximize profit. They have helped transform immigration enforcement from a civil misdemeanor process into a multibillion-dollar business with human lives as currency.
Here is a profile of the two most prominent companies that will be handling many of the new detention centers created by the $185 billion boondoggle.
GEO Group: Profiting from Detention
Founded in 1984 as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, it was rebranded as GEO Group in 2003. Its headquarters are in Boca Raton, Florida, and it has an annual revenue (2023) of $2.4 billion.
GEO’s core business includes private prisons, immigration detention centers, electronic monitoring, and community reentry programs. Today, they employ over 18,000 people globally. It is one of the largest contractors for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The GEO group already operates dozens of immigrant detention centers across the U.S., including the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, one of the largest in the country. They have received hundreds of millions of dollars during the first Trump administration as ICE expanded detention capacity and will receive hundreds of millions more with the new allocation of funds.
Contracts are often structured with “guaranteed minimum occupancy.” Taxpayers pay for empty beds if they're not filled, which incentivizes ICE to provide more bodies for the centers, whether they are illegal or not.
Human rights abuses within GEO Group are rampant. There have been repeated reports of unsafe conditions, medical neglect, and detainee deaths in GEO-run facilities. There have been forced labor lawsuits. GEO has been sued for paying detainees $1/day (or nothing at all) for essential work, violating human trafficking laws. So far, nothing has been changed because of the lawsuits.
However, Donald Trump is indebted to the GEO Group, so never mind the human rights abuses. They have leveraged maximum political influence by spending millions on lobbying and campaign contributions on his behalf. From 2016–2024, GEO gave large sums to pro-Trump PACs and GOP campaigns. Their stock shares soared after Trump won in 2024, anticipating a pro-detention policy. They stand to gain billions of dollars in contracts.
CoreCivic: Rebranded, Not Reformed
CoreCivic was founded in 1983 as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) but was renamed CoreCivic in 2016 to improve its public image. They have headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee.
CoreCIvic has annual Revenue (2023) of around $1.9 billion, with its core business including private prisons, immigration detention, and real estate leasing to government agencies. They have around 11,000 employees.
They are a major contractor for ICE detention centers and border enforcement facilities. They operate or lease numerous ICE facilities, including the T. Don Hutto Residential Center (TX) and Otay Mesa Detention Center (CA). CoreCivic has benefited significantly from the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, family detention policies, and border militarization.
However, CoreCivic is also embroiled in controversy. Reports of abuse and neglect are rampant. They are accused of sexual abuse coverups, denying medical care, overcrowding, and placing children in adult facilities. It is a classic case of profit over care: internal audits and whistleblower reports describe cost-cutting at the expense of basic needs and safety.
Just like GEO Group, CoreCivic was a top donor to Trump’s 2016 and 2024 inauguration and supported GOP candidates favoring private detention.
These companies didn’t just benefit from Trump’s budget and ICE expansion; they actively lobbied for it. They hired former DHS and ICE officials as consultants. They contributed to think tanks and PACs pushing for harsher immigration enforcement. They turned family separation and mass detention into a reliable revenue stream to line their own pockets on the suffering of other people.
How Will GEO Group & CoreCivic Profit from the Big Ugly Bill?
The BUB allocates $45 billion over four years specifically for ICE immigration detention centers, effectively tripling ICE’s budget, and doubling bed capacity from around 56,000 to over 100,000, possibly up to 150,000
As the dominant private contractors, GEO and CoreCivic operate roughly 90% of ICE facilities. That makes them the direct beneficiaries of expanded contracts.
Cha’-Ching!
Additionally, ICE is using emergency authority to issue no‑bid contracts, bypassing competitive procurement for rapid facility reopenings, such as Leavenworth (CoreCivic) and Delaney Hall (GEO). These contracts include “guaranteed minimum occupancy” clauses and allow government payment even for empty beds, locking in profits for GEO and CoreCivic.
The Big Ugly Bill also includes $30 billion earmarked for ICE enforcement and deportation operations, plus funding for 10,000 new ICE agents. This means more arrests, which equals more detainees, which requires more bed space and transportation services. These are services both companies provide.
Their bottom lines stand to soar, as government spending defaults to their existing detention capacity and contracts. The no-bid and occupancy-guaranteed deals lock in payouts with significantly shrinking financial risk. All paid for on your dime! Investor optimism has already materialized in stock market reactions, driving their prices up.
Whatever Will They Do With So Many Detainees?
It is a good time to be in the private detention business. Human enslavement is indeed profitable.
Trump’s promise to deport 11 or 12 million “undocumented” workers is as unrealistic as the promise of the Titanic not to sink. However, deportation may not be the real goal anyway. Some will be deported, but the majority will be sitting in detention centers.
Having hundreds of thousands of people sitting around in detention centers is way too much of an opportunity. These are immigrants who were here working jobs that no white person wanted in the first place. Why not lease out their labor…and pay them maybe a dollar a day? Why pay the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour when you can get the same workers for around ten cents an hour?
Detaining 11 million undocumented people to use as unpaid or low-paid workers is a much bigger capitalistic win than deportation. Incarceration always has been and always will be a major profit center for anyone without a moral compass or scruples to engage in it.
But then, when has Donald Trump ever, in his life, ever expressed anything close to a moral compass or conscience?
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I was in doing a photo along the border of FL and GA in around 2005 and I was in a small town with a group of folk practicing for the rodeo. I met a man who’d been employed as the supervisor of a prison work detail groups, and it struck me: “Oh wow, the South never got over slavery!” But of course, it’s the whole nation, alas.
I wonder why the two graphics have such different rates. The first one has 614 per 100,000 and the second 355. This seems like too big a disparity for year to year variation.