ICE Detention and Surveillance Translate Into Hundreds of Millions for Companies

Business is booming for the private prison companies that operate much of President Donald Trump’s immigrant detention apparatus.

Private prison giant Geo Group announced this week that it has seen its largest amount of new business ever in 2025. The company’s executives expect it to translate into $3 billion in revenue next year. Geo Group’s detention occupancy level — 26,000 people — is at an all-time high, according to its latest quarterly report.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” company founder George Zoley said on an earnings call Thursday. “Our existing facilities are on full throttle.”

Executives at CoreCivic, another private prison company, and the tech company Palantir also released numbers this week boasting of hundreds of millions in revenue from July to September, bolstered by their contracts to build up Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention infrastructure and surveillance system.

While the companies’ profits grow, so do concerns for detainees’ safety and the erosion of privacy rights.

CoreCivic’s CEO said Thursday that the company expects a record-breaking $2.5 billion in revenue next year.

Business with ICE contributed to $682 million in revenue for Geo Group in the third quarter of the fiscal year and $580 million in revenue for CoreCivic in the same period. Those hundreds of millions translate to a 13% increase for Geo Group and 18% for CoreCivic from the third quarter of last year to this year.

ICE had custody of more than 55,200 people at CoreCivic-run detention centers in the third quarter, an increase of nearly 5,000 from the same time period last year, according to the Tennessee-based company’s latest financial results published Wednesday.

In late September and early October, the company announced $300 million worth of contracts to scale up detention space in California, Kansas and Oklahoma. In the short term, that could mean some empty beds, meaning higher costs and idle detention space, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger said during an earnings call Thursday.

“I certainly wouldn’t interpret pace as being any indicator of a lessening of long-term demand potential,” Hininger, who is leaving his post as CEO on Jan. 1, told investors.

Geo Group also has 6,000 idle detention beds that it expects to ultimately fill through more contracts with ICE, which executives say has been slow moving because of the lapse in government funding due to the shutdown.

The increase in the detention population helped make the 2025 fiscal year one of the deadliest for detainees in ICE custody, with 21 deaths across the country. The federal agency reported four deaths in October.

An investigation released last week by Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, uncovered that from January to August, there were 85 credible reports of medical neglect and 82 credible reports of detainees lacking access to adequate food or water.

Geo Group, CoreCivic and ICE have repeatedly denied detainees’ claims of mistreatment, with the companies insisting that they meet federal immigration detention standards, and ICE saying that those detention standards are higher than those citizens are subjected to in prisons.

Detention Watch Network and other groups advocating for immigrants’ rights say that’s not the case.

“What we’re witnessing right now is a multilayered detention expansion plan that includes proliferating ICE operations into other government agencies, using military bases as deportation hubs, deepening ties with private prison companies and growing ICE partnerships with local sheriffs and county jails,” Setareh Ghandehari, Detention Watch Network’s advocacy director, said at a press conference last week about deaths in ICE custody. “This mind-blowing investment into the immigration detention system driven by Trump’s mass-deportation campaign comes at the expense of all Americans.”

Trump’s deportation efforts aren’t only good for companies in the detention business.

During the third quarter of the fiscal year, ICE paid Palantir $51 million for software to help with criminal investigations and to track self-deportations and people who have overstayed their visas, according to transaction history on USAspending. In April, Palantir got a $30 million payment to develop a prototype of the surveillance tool by Sept. 25.

The money from ICE is but a drop in the bucket of Palantir’s $883 million U.S. revenue in the third quarter. The Denver company also has a $10 billion decade-long defense contract with the U.S. Army.

Despite growing criticism of the aggressive tactics immigration agents are deploying against protesters, Palantir CEO Alex Karp leaned into the controversy during an earnings call Monday.

“We power ICE,” he said.

Karp, who has become increasingly entangled with the Trump administration, also praised the strikes against 14 vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September that the Trump administration has accused of drug trafficking.

“Let me say something slightly political … when people are attacking our soldiers for stopping fentanyl from coming to this country,” Karp said, “I want people to remember: If fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working-class people, we’d be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America.”

Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the privacy-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical of whether the software will work as Palantir advertises it. But she said that if it works, it could become a dangerous way of weaponizing data collected by the government for one purpose and used for another.

“We see the government throwing more and more of our taxpayer money at this idea that they can somehow collect and organize everything that they know about us and only use it for good,” Cohn told NOTUS. “And I think we ought to be very, very skeptical of this, both as a matter of our rights and our privacy, but also as a matter of like, ‘Is this the best way we can spend our tax dollars?’”

The monetary transactions have also flowed from Palantir to the Trump administration, with the company contributing to Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project. It also sponsored the military parade in June. Karp personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Geo Group also donated $1 million to one of the biggest PACs supporting Trump’s reelection, according to the FEC.