Private prisons are cashing in on Trump's ICE crackdown. They're just getting started

[marmar]

Private prisons are cashing in on Trump’s ICE crackdown. They’re just getting started
Over 90 percent of detained immigrants languish in prisons that aren't actually run by the government

By Nicholas Liu
Reporter
Published January 28, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) Immediately after President Trump’s election victory in 2024, private prison stocks soared and company executives could hardly contain their glee. As Trump’s immigration crackdown has accelerated, so has enthusiasm for the business of keeping people caged.

More than 90,000 people are incarcerated in private prisons across the United States, where the purpose of holding them is dominated by an incentive to maximize profit, as with any successful business. Many more people live in federal and state prisons where private contractors often source the food and medical care, or receive easy labor from its inhabitants. The more people Immigration and Customs Enforcement puts behind bars, the better for private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic — which is why, according to critics, they’ve been eagerly cheering on the Trump deportation agenda.

Among detained persons as a whole, 90,000 is about 8 percent of the total prison population. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, that number jumps to 90 percent among non-citizen immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security.

“It is possible that because of fluctuations in how many people are in prison, the government doesn’t want to tie itself to those facilities and those beds and the costs of all that without knowing what the actual prison population is going to be,” said Andrea Pitzer, a journalist and author of a book about concentration camp regimes around the world. “Private prisons are a way for the government to outsource some immediate costs and pay for beds over time.” ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/28/private-prisons-are-cashing-in-on-trumps-ice-crackdown-theyre-just-getting-started/

[SSJVegeta]

1. Another parallel with Nazis

[Irish_Dem]

2. US is spending huge amounts of money on a gestapo army and concentration camps.