The nation’s largest private prison company, the GEO Group, has seen its stock soar in the weeks since Donald Trump’s election in anticipation of new contracts linked to mass deportation.
Trump’s new choice for U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, worked as GEO’s lobbyist as recently as 2019. Her list of corporate clients also includes Amazon, the tech giant currently embroiled in an antitrust fight with the federal government.
Trump announced his selection of Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, hours after another loyalist of his, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration Thursday under growing scrutiny of allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl.
Bondi will bring her own baggage to the nomination process in the form of a long list of clients she maintained at the powerhouse D.C. lobbying firm Ballard Partners, which also included the Qatari government, General Motors, and the Florida Sheriffs Association, among others.
One critic of the revolving door between politics and lobbying said Bondi’s work for those firms exemplified “the maturation of the political strategy of corporate America and our oligarch class” to spread even more money around beyond campaign donations.
“Pam Bondi surely did work for these clients the past four years, but some of the economic calculus of hiring was for an eventuality like what we’re experiencing, even if the highly placed job of attorney general may not have been foreseen specifically,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.
In 2019, Bondi was part of a team lobbying the White House and Department of Homeland Security on behalf of the GEO Group, according to a disclosure form filed with the U.S. House of Representatives. Bondi was already a star in the conservative legal world and had served on Trump’s transition team three years before.
The GEO Group stands to benefit handsomely if Trump’s proposed mass deportations swell the population at its facilities. In one recent corporate earnings call, company officials said it stood to make $400 million extra in revenue per year. The company’s stock has soared more than 100 percent since the day before the election.
The exact nature of Bondi’s work for the GEO Group is not disclosed in the lobbying forms, which downplay the company’s role in shaping immigration policy.
According to the form, the company’s lobbyists are involved in “promoting the use of public-private partnerships in correctional services, including evidence based rehabilitation programs aimed at reducing recidivism. GEO does not advocate for or against criminal justice policy related to the criminalizing certain behaviors or length of criminal sentences, nor does GEO take a position on immigration enforcement policies or detention policies.”
In addition to immigration detainees, the GEO Group’s jails also hold people awaiting criminal trial. The Justice Department was previously an important client for the GEO Group, which operated detention facilities on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service. In January 2021, President Joe Biden issued an order for the federal government to stop using private prison contracts, though The Intercept reported that the company found ways to keep their contracts alive.
Bondi’s work for two Silicon Valley titans – Amazon and Uber – provides some indication of her approach to the aggressive antitrust stance taken by the Biden administration.
Gaetz was viewed with alarm by Democrats, who said he was unqualified and poised to turn the Department of Justice into a tool of revenge for Trump.
Still, he also had been greeted with wary optimism by progressives focused on breaking up corporate monopolies, who pointed to Gaetz’s pro-antitrust stance.
The Department of Justice’s antitrust division is a key arm of the government’s antitrust enforcement mechanism, with the staffing and statutory authority to take on big corporations. Under the Biden administration, it has sued Apple, Google, and Live Nation-Ticketmaster, alleging that those companies operated illegal monopolies in their respective markets.
Amazon, Bondi’s client, faced a separate antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission.
When Bondi was tapped to help defend Trump against his first round of impeachment charges in 2019, White House officials dismissed the idea that her client roll posed a conflict of interest.
“She’s not here to lobby. She’s here to make sense about how in the world we’re going to impeach or remove a democratically elected president,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said at the time.
A Trump transition spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment.
