A private prison company that has raked in billions by selling immigration detention centers to the Trump administration wants the government to “move quickly” on more deals, days after a Democratic landslide in the midterms.
CoreCivic has sold four detention centers to the Department of Homeland Security this year for $2.2 billion and has been touting plans for future sales. But its new CEO faced questions Thursday during an earnings call from investors wanting to know if that would continue under Democratic control of Congress starting in January.
“We can’t predict what will happen one way or the other on timing or really on whether they will happen at all,” CEO Lucibeth Mayberry said of the negotiations for additional sales. “We would urge the ICE administration to move quickly. They have a need for capacity. We have the capacity. There’s no reason to wait.”
Mayberry, who took over as the head of CoreCivic in September, emphasized that Congress had given DHS billions for immigration detention — $45 billion in 2025 and $31 billion last year — available through fiscal year 2029. She said she saw no reason DHS wouldn’t continue entering into contracts until that funding is gone.
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But the massive cash influx Congress gave to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the contracts with CoreCivic and its main competitor, Geo Group, are set to come under scrutiny once Democrats take back the gavel.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee dealing with immigration, said the heads of the companies can expect to be called to testify. She’s been closely tracking immigrants’ deaths in detention.
“The gravy train is over,” Jayapal said.
And Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) is seeking to chair the House Appropriations Committee, saying the party must “claw back” billions of dollars Republicans gave to ICE and Border Patrol outside of the regular appropriations process.
Geo Group is expecting to sell four detention centers to DHS by the end of the year, but those sales won’t materialize if the company can’t secure long-term agreements to manage the daily operations, CEO George Zoley told investors Thursday.
The company announced last month the sale of a complex of more than 2,600 beds in Adelanto, California, to ICE for $950 million and a new 10-year contract to run the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, that will generate $140 million in annual revenue.
The day before the election, Geo Group announced another 10-year contract to manage a 2,329-bed detention center in Big Spring, Texas, though it does not own the land.
CoreCivic acknowledges in its quarterly reports that its contracts with ICE can be terminated. “We can provide no assurance that we will continue to manage these facilities in the future, or that the terms of the management agreements will remain the same,” the most recent report states.
The detention center sales have already raised questions about federal waste and how the federal government is agreeing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for detention centers that, in most cases, ICE was already using.
For example, ICE paid more than $495 million for a vacant 1,600-bed lockup in Appleton, Minnesota, that CoreCivic had offered to the state government for $75 million a year prior, an investigation from KARE 11 found.
Both companies and the Trump administration have said the value is calculated based on how much it would take to replace the buildings, adjusted depreciation and land value, among other factors.
“Why are both of those things happening in the order that they’re happening in?” Jayapal said of the sales and long-term management agreements. “It seems like somebody is making a lot of profit off of these sales and purchases, and we need to understand that.”
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