Private Prison Companies Call Trump’s Deportation Plans ‘Unprecedented Opportunity’

Private prison executives imagined tracking “millions” of people electronically, transporting hundreds of thousands by plane, and expanding detention centers.

On earnings calls Thursday, private prison groups expressed a nearly unrestrained glee over what one called the “unprecedented opportunity” that a second Trump administration brings.

Trump made mass deportation of undocumented immigrants ― and even some immigrants who are here legally ― a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, building on years of racist and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, speaking affectionately for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mass deportation program, and even invoking an 18th-century law that would give him broad powers to pursue deportations.

Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes, including violent crimes, than American citizens; massively contribute to the economy; and oftentimes have spent years or decades establishing lives, families and communities in the United States.

Key Trump advisors have also openly discussed building mass deportation camps along the border capable of detaining tens of thousands of people at a time as judges process their deportation orders, attached to “constantly” operating runways with deportation flights around the world. While Democratic presidents have also massively expanded the immigration incarceration and deportation system in recent years, Trump is proposing his own generational escalation.

That sort of thing is music to the ears of private prison operators ― whose stock prices soared upon the projections of Trump’s second term in the White House. (On Wednesday, GEO Group was “the single biggest winner in the U.S. stock market — among companies of any size,” according to the investment news site Sherwood News, which is owned by Robinhood.)