On an earnings call Tuesday, the head of a huge private prison company celebrated the Laken Riley Act and Donald Trump’s anti-immigration executive orders.
The new law and Trump’s policies are expected to lead to a flood of detention and deportation, with the private prison firm predicting that the government could ultimately need up to 200,000 new beds to hold immigration detainees.
CoreCivic is so excited by its daily calls with the Trump administration that it is spending at least $40 million to renovate facilities even before inking new contracts, CEO Damon Hininger said on the call for investors.
“I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,” Hininger said, adding that he expects “perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history over the next several years.”
With $2 billion in revenue, CoreCivic is a publicly traded company that dominates the private prison market along with another company, the GEO Group, which will not report its fourth-quarter earnings until later this month.
Photo: John Hanna/AP
The call offered one of the first corporate responses to the Laken Riley Act, the recently passed law that requires federal authorities to detain undocumented immigrants accused of crimes as minor as shoplifting.
The law drew unanimous support from Republicans and a cohort of swing-district Democrats in Congress.
Critics warned that it would swell the numbers of people locked up in immigration facilities that are frequently criticized for substandard conditions, and rip apart families, with little benefit to public safety.
So far, the Trump administration’s immigration arrests have yet to swell the detention population, officials said. The tone of CoreCivic’s call with investors was buoyant, however, with a parade of corporate officials predicting that the second Trump era would yield a financial bonanza.
Hininger said the company has been in contact with the transition team on “a daily basis” since Trump’s victory in November and has already put a proposal to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold an extra 28,000 people.
The total number of beds that the government could need to hold more immigrants could include 100,000 beds for more aggressive enforcement in general, and 50,000 to 100,000 additional beds in connection with the Laken Riley Act.
The only potential damper: Trump’s grim vision of sending 30,000 people to Guantánamo Bay, which is already facing pushback in court, and Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele’s offer to host deportees of any nationality for cash.
Private prison companies’ stock prices soared on Trump’s victory but have slid since then as Trump talks up alternatives abroad.
Hininger said that his private prisons would cost less and be less likely to be rejected by judges — but there was plenty of market opportunity for everyone.
“I want to be very clear on this: We don’t see that as an either-or. We actually see it as a both of them being utilized,” he said. “They’re going to need really all that capacity to meet the mission and the needs.”
“They’re going to need really all that capacity to meet the mission and the needs.”
Company officials said they were already taking steps to offer immigrant family detention, a policy the Trump administration plans to revive after Joe Biden ended it in 2021.
CoreCivic officials said they were also excited about Trump’s executive order reversing a Biden-era ban on private-prison contracting for holding people in federal criminal custody.
That order never applied to immigration detention, which makes up a large share of CoreCivic’s operations.
In lobbying for more work with federal agencies like the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service, CoreCivic could face competition from GEO Group, the firm that previously hired now-Attorney General Pam Bondi as a lobbyist.
Some of the groundwork for expanding immigration detention was already being laid in the final months of the Biden administration, leading to criticism from rights groups who said the government should have been focused on permanently shutting facilities down instead.
