A private prison company announced three contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars this week that will boost the Trump administration’s capacity to hold immigrants in detention centers across the country.
CoreCivic, one of two prison giants that have cashed in from President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations, expects to rake in nearly $300 million more from new contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The acceleration is being fueled by the $45 billion Republican lawmakers gave the agency through Trump’s tax cut and spending package.
Meanwhile, immigrant advocacy groups worry that mistreatment of detainees will worsen and spread with the rapid expansion of detention centers.
The California, Kansas and Oklahoma detention center contracts announced this week are part of ICE’s roadmap to double detention space to hold more than 100,000 people, a plan first reported by The Washington Post while in development in August.
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Once fully operational, the detention centers awarded contracts announced this week would add more than 5,700 beds by 2026, according to CoreCivic’s announcements.
“The number of people who are being held in detention increases on almost a daily basis, and certainly ICE is working very quickly to try to bring even more detention facilities and more detention beds into the system,” said Eunice Cho, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project.
Nearly 60,000 people were under ICE detention as of Sept. 21, and most, 72%, didn’t have criminal convictions, according to TRAC Immigration, a nonprofit data research center at Syracuse University. The number of people in detention is thousands fewer than the existing number of approximately 69,000 beds available, an ICE spokesperson told NOTUS.
CoreCivic expects more to come: “Looking forward, we anticipate additional contracting activity that will help satisfy ICE’s growing needs,” CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger said in a press release touting two contracts Monday.
One of the three centers with new CoreCivic contracts is already housing detainees. The California City Correctional Facility started holding detainees on Aug. 27, according to the press release announcing the two-year contract.
Since then, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian reported that 100 of 500 detainees protested a lack of proper medical treatment, faulty toilets, and access to outdoor spaces through hunger strikes.
The California Immigrant Policy Center’s advocacy team is gravely concerned with the conditions at the largest California detention center, said Bruno Huizar, the organization’s supervising policy manager for detention and deportation.
“If the federal government and ICE continue to rapidly expand detention, or people being put into detention, it’s going to be dangerous,” Huizar said. “People are going to be facing life-threatening conditions where they have little to no access to food, water, and basic hygiene. Nobody deserves to be held in inhumane conditions.”
Both CoreCivic and ICE denied accounts of mistreatment of detainees in statements to NOTUS. The prison company expects an annual revenue of $130 million from running the California City detention center.
“Regarding the allegations that have been raised at our California City Correctional Facility (CCCF), we have seen no evidence to support them and have no reason to believe they are credible,” Brian Todd, the company’s manager of public affairs, said in a statement.
An ICE spokesperson called the reports of the hunger strike inaccurate.
“Claims of so-called ‘human rights abuses’ are nothing more than recycled talking points from activist groups and criminal aliens who broke our laws,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement.
When detainees will start arriving at the Leavenworth, Kansas, detention center is uncertain because of a legal dispute playing out in federal court between the city and CoreCivic. It is slated to detain 1,033 people and yield $60 million per year for the company.
In Oklahoma, the Diamondback Correctional Facility has sat idle since 2010. It will bring in an estimated $100 million for CoreCivic once fully operational in 2026.
A rapid increase in the detainee population would further stress the network of legal support for immigrants, said Cho, who emphasized that private prison companies benefit from holding more people in their jails.
“There’s a lot of money to be made,” she said.
The press releases announcing the contracts state that the agreements with the federal government provide a fixed monthly payment and an “incremental per diem payment based on detainee populations.”