The President Bought the Stock, Then Filled the Beds

He owns a piece of the companies that hold people in cages. The people in the cages work for one dollar a day.

On the tenth day of his second term, Donald Trump’s brokers bought private prison stock. They kept buying and selling GEO Group and CoreCivic all year, 29 trades, somewhere between 281,029 and 990,000 dollars. Then his administration went out and built the demand.

Is this a conflict of interest? sure is. But it works differently than that, because he does not just hold the stock, he controls the policy that sets the revenue. So he skips the whole conflict of interest conversation and goes straight to the power. He signs the order. ICE fills the beds. The company books the margin, and the share price moves. Then his broker places the trade, and he never has to pick up a phone. His holdings sit in a revocable trust with his son as trustee and himself as the sole beneficiary. That is not a blind trust and was never built to be one. Every president from Carter to Biden either went blind or stayed out of the market. He did neither, on purpose.

The companies said it out loud, on earnings calls, in his first month. They told their investors this administration would be the best thing that ever happened to them. They were not guessing, and they were right. GEO’s profit went from 32 million dollars in 2024 to more than 254 million in 2025, close to a 700% increase. This month GEO and CoreCivic reported 1.4 billion dollars in revenue between them, for a single quarter.

And the people running the enforcement came out of the same industry. Tom Homan consulted for GEO Group before he became border czar. Pam Bondi lobbied for GEO before she became Attorney General. David Venturella was a GEO executive, then he moved to ICE to handle detention contracts, and now he runs ICE. Homan helped hire him. Nobody hid any of this, because nobody had to.

And nobody can prove he steered a single contract to GEO. Looking for that proof is the mistake. He does not have to steer anything, because he signs the policy and the policy is the earnings report. Waiting for a smoking gun is how an arrangement like this stays legal.

ICE makes the arrest. GEO does not arrest anyone and does not need to, because the government hands the man over and then pays GEO by the bed, by the night. That is the first stream, and it is public money.

Then the man goes to work. The people being held cook the meals, run the industrial laundry, wax the floors, scrub the bathrooms, cut the hair, do the maintenance. Everything in the building except the guarding. They are paid one dollar a day, a rate Congress set in 1950 and never touched. So the payroll never appears. Every job that would cost a wage in any other building in the country costs a dollar in this one, and that gap is the second stream. The margin comes from a workforce that cannot quit.

Last July, Congress handed ICE 45 billion dollars for detention alone, more than the government spent holding migrants under Obama, Biden and Trump’s first term combined. Most of it ends up with the contractors.

GEO reopened Delaney Hall in Newark on a 15 year contract, in a sanctuary city, the same year the administration moved to cut sanctuary cities off from federal money. This spring the people held there went on a hunger and labor strike. They said the food was moldy, that medical care was refused, that it was so crowded they were sleeping on the floor. A labor strike, which tells you what they had been doing in there.

The 13th Amendment allows forced labor as punishment for a crime. The people in ICE detention have not been convicted of one. Most of them have no criminal record at all.

The American South leased its convicts to private companies after 1865, and arrests went up whenever the companies needed hands. Same design. New statute.

And people die in there. Last year more of them died in ICE custody than in any year in two decades. A bed pays whether the person in it is healthy or not.

Privatization did not put a limit on the coercion. It gave the coercion a revenue model, a quarterly earnings call, and a shareholder base that wants the number to go up.

None of it was built in one term. Venturella worked inside this system under Bush and under Obama. Both parties funded the beds, signed the contracts, and left the dollar a day alone for 75 years. Trump did not invent the machine. He bought a piece of it, staffed it with the vendor’s people, and stopped pretending.