With ICE crackdowns on the rise, private prisons are booming businesses
Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transported—sometimes thousands of miles across the country—to large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast.
ICE currently holds more than 48,000 detainees, though the agency only has funding to support housing for 41,500. Despite that overflow, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller now want ICE to ramp up arrests to 3,000 per day —and private prisons stand to benefit.
Taxpayers are expected to shoulder the cost of this potential expansion, but the money won't just go to the government: The majority of ICE's 113 detention facilities are not government-run. More than 90% of immigrants arrested by the agency are held in private detention centers, most of which are operated by just two companies: GEO Group and CoreCivic.
Private prisons occupy a controversial place in the criminal justice system, said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at the Sentencing Project. Beyond general discomfort with the idea of profiting off of incarceration, reports have also questioned safety and security, citing higher incidences of assaults, theft, and contraband in private facilities than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons.
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