Private prisons and other companies that provide detention services are getting ready to cash in on what President-elect Trump has billed as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” That includes scouring for as many detention beds as possible in their networks of facilities, and scouting sites for new buildings to house migrants. Some executives are considering whether to take up the controversial work of detaining families or unaccompanied children. “This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity,” George Zoley of the GEO group told investors on an earnings call after the election. Implementing a deportation on the scale Trump has promised would constitute an unprecedented logistical feat for the U.S. government, identifying, locating, arresting, detaining, adjudicating and transporting potentially millions of men, women, and children, reports the Wall Street Journal. The actual scope of Trump’s plans remains unclear. After he promised mass deportations during his first term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 935,000 people who had been living in the U.S. illegally, says the Migration Policy Institute—fewer per year than during the Obama presidency The Biden administration, which deported relatively few people in its first year, deported more than 271,000 in fiscal year 2024—the most in 10 years. Biden deported some 545,000 over hiss four years.
GEO Group is looking at a potentially doubling of its services, which include housing immigration detainees. Trump and his advisers have said that they intend to focus initially on migrants who crossed the border illegally and and have a criminal background, causing some allies to worry that Trump may trim his plans. Tom Homan, chosen by Trump to run the deportation effort, says that ICE will need enough beds to detain a minimum of 100,000 migrants. The agency has funding to maintain 41,500 beds. The American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group, has estimated that deporting one million people in one year would cost $88 billion, including expenses associated with arrest, detention, legal processing and removal. There were an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. as of 2022. GEO houses about 40% of ICE detainees. Zoley said GEO has enough empty or idle detention beds to quickly raise the number of migrants it detains from a current 13,500 to more than 31,000. They would bring GEO more than $400 million in annual revenues if reactivated for a mass deportation. Under its subsidiary BI Incorporated, GEO holds the ICE contract for electronic monitoring of migrants awaiting court dates, which could be increased exponentially from a present 182,500. Core Civic, the other major player in ICE detention, had a similar message for investors after the election. The company believes it could quickly bring its detention capacity to 25,000 beds by bringing unused ones online, including at a facility previously used to hold families in Dilley, Tex., said CEO Damon Hininger.