Donald Trump may be destroying the economy for average Americans, but the private prison industry is making a killing from the president’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
Top executives from the country’s two largest private prison companies hosted earnings calls last week in which they touted the massive profits they have been able to rake in from taxpayer-funded contracts with the federal government.
America’s two largest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, are reporting a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue over the spring as immigration detention closes in on record levels.
Those revenues announced Thursday do not include net proceeds of $1.6 billion made by CoreCivic after the recent sale of four of their facilities to the Department of Homeland Security. Patrick Swindle, CoreCivic’s President and CEO, told investors on an earnings call that that works out to an average rate of $307,000 per bed.
The earnings — from April through June of this year — come as the U.S. is holding almost 66,000 people in immigration detention, nearing record levels not seen since January, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center. Both companies say they’re also finding other revenue opportunities, like ankle monitors for Haitian immigrants who recently lost their protected immigration status.
Nothing screams late-stage capitalism like private prison companies licking their chops over the chance to profit from Trump’s racist police state as it homes in on Haitians.
Making the news all the more corrupt is that Trump’s recent financial disclosure forms show he is effectively profiting from his own mass incarceration and deportation agenda, given that his brokers have bought and sold large amounts of stock in CoreCivic and GEO Group over the past year.
Trump’s policies have seemingly devastated every aspect of American life. They have caused farms and hospitals to languish, gutted food programs for hungry families, slashed healthcare and canceled funding for potentially lifesaving research. Meanwhile, his administration is helping line the pockets of the private prison companies he invests in and the oil companies that have invested in his political operation.
CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle said on last week’s earnings call that his company has cleaned up over the past year, even during a government shutdown in which many Americans were suffering:
Swindle said that CoreCivic’s total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million. CoreCivic exceeded expectations in a period that included the government shutdown, Swindle said. This was accomplished in part by lowering operating costs — meaning the business of detaining people is becoming cheaper — and because of more people being put in detention.
The GEO Group — with its eyebrow-raising ties to the Trump administration — also did quite well, evidently:
GEO Group CEO George Zoley said in his company’s earnings call also on Thursday that thanks to 2025 contracts, total revenues are up to $732.1 million — an increase of nearly $96 million or 15% — over the same period last year.
GEO Group’s government ties run deep. Former GEO Group executive David Venturella is the acting director of ICE. In a recent letter, he told lawmakers he has divested his GEO Group stock.
Behold — an example of authoritarianism, cronyism and racism rolled into one. The wannabe-king president is leading a bigoted crusade against immigrants that is fattening his ideologically aligned profiteers in the private prison industry, all while many Americans reel from his wretched economic policies.
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