On CoreCivic’s earnings call in February, a Wall Street analyst had some complaints. The company was doing fine on revenue. Revenue was up. The administration has thrown immigration enforcement wide open. Public tax money was poured into detention.
But something was not right. ICE was holding fewer people than the market expected. Investors were expecting around 100,000 people in detention, but the real number was closer to 70,000. They don’t like it.
Tens of thousands of people already behind bars are not a problem. The government already spending billions to lock people up, that was not a problem. The real problem, from the investor’s point of view, was that the machine was running a little bit below capacity.
So, understand that at a shareholder call, a Wall Street analyst asked a prison company why it was not imprisoning more people. Border security is not the real issue here.
CoreCivic and GEO Group, these two companies are running most of the country’s immigration detention centers. The product is always the human confinement, and the detained people are the volume.
GEO booked a record 254 million dollars in profit for 2025. That’s up 700% from a year before. Its founder, George Zoley, told investors it was the best year for new business in the company’s history. CoreCivic made 116.5 million dollars, up about 70% compared to the year before, and said 2026 would be better. All this money was made off the people who ended up behind bars.
This is how the money works. The government writes the checks from taxpayers’ contributions. The company will fill the beds. The investors are waiting for the beds to be filled and the count to rise. And the only incentive is this: the more people behind the cage, the better.
And the demand is guaranteed. Last year’s budget bill put 45 billion dollars into immigration detention and nearly tripled ICE’s budget almost overnight, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. The target is around 100,000 detention beds, including eight mega-centers built to hold up to 10,000 people each. This is not an emergency response that winds down. It is permanent infrastructure, paid for with public money, and infrastructure builds its own momentum.
And do not let anyone sell you this as one party’s crime. CoreCivic likes to remind people that ICE was its first customer more than 40 years ago. These companies write checks to both parties. Republicans expanded this system. Democrats did not take it apart when they had the chance. The argument everyone is having about who sits in the White House is the argument that keeps you from asking who is cashing the checks underneath.
America has run a version of this before. After the Civil War, Southern states leased prisoners out to private companies for labor, which handed everyone involved a reason to arrest and convict more people. Once locking humans up pays, the system starts hunting for more humans to lock up.
Here is the part the earnings call skips. The pace they want to speed up is the pace that is killing people. 2025 was the deadliest year in immigration detention in over two decades, and 2026 is on track to beat it. One of the dead was Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man who died at Camp East Montana in Texas in January. The county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by asphyxia. Witnesses said guards held him down while he told them he could not breathe. ICE gave one account, then changed it. On the earnings call there are no names like his. There are beds, contracts, and growth.
This is the part people get wrong when they reach for the word conspiracy. There is no secret room. The system does not need one. It only needs incentives. You have private companies with a paying interest in confining and tracking as many people as the government will fund, and a government funding it. Nobody has to be evil for this to end where it is ending. The capital does the work on its own. It found something people will pay to have done, it wants more of it, and a death in custody does not enter the math, because the math has no room for it.
And it is already moving past detention. GEO now tracks well over 100,000 people by GPS monitor and calls electronic surveillance its next growth market. Once a government builds a profitable machine to confine and monitor people, the question quietly changes. It stops being who is targeted today. It becomes how far this can be expanded tomorrow. Today it is immigrants. The machinery does not care after that.
There is no political principle on that earnings call. There is a market, and the market does not ask whether a person deserves dignity. It asks whether there is demand. A bed is an asset. A monitor is a product. A human life becomes a line on a spreadsheet. The people who pay are the ones in the cells and the working people whose taxes cover the bill. The people who profit are on the call.
And if you’re waiting for me to tell you how to fix this, I got nothing. Not because it’s some big secret. Because there’s no one piece you can pull out and fix. The immigration system, the way your tax money gets spent, the profit these companies make off locked-up people, that’s not stuff that got stuck onto the machine by accident. That is the machine. Everybody up and down the line is complaining about something. But the only complaint that ever gets answered is the one from the people making money.
You can’t fix this from the inside. You’d have to tear the whole thing down and build it again, and I’ll be straight with you, I don’t know what that even looks like.
"And the only incentive is this: the more people behind the cage, the better." Sickening