Trump Tosses Toothless Biden Private Prison “Ban”
Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) issued an executive order reversing one from his predecessor that barred the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) from contracting with private prisons.
That order from former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) affected only people detained by DOJ, including about 14,000 of nearly 150,000 prisoners then held by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). It did not extend to the United States Department of Homeland Security, leaving most of nearly 40,000 people detained by its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in private lockups, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.16.]
Biden also granted numerous extensions to the ban to the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS)—which also developed workarounds by contracting to place detainees with counties which then contracted detention space from private prison firms, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2022, p.48.]
All of which means that two presidents have now issued bans and reversals of bans on private prisons with much fanfare, without meaningfully affecting the use of privately contracted detention in the country. Indeed, GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two largest private prison firms, saw their stock prices soar in the hours after Trump’s November 2024 election, which PLN covered. [See: PLN, Feb. 2025, p.55.]
In 2023, according to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, ICE contracts provided 30% of CoreCivic’s $1.9 billion in revenue, while 21% came from USMS and another 2% from BOP as it wound down contracts signed before Biden took office in 2021. Of GEO Group’s $2.4 billion in revenue that same year, ICE provided 43%, USMS another 16%, and 3% came from the BOP.
Trump has promised mass deportations of immigrants, requiring a huge number of additional cells for ICE detention—and nearly all of that is contracted from private prison profiteers. In an earnings call with investors on February 11, 2025, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger called the administration’s embrace of private prisons and mass detention “one of the most exciting periods of my career.”
On January 29, 2025, the President also ordered construction of a massive 30,000-bed prison at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba, which will hold “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, newly installed from his former position at a TV news reading desk, called a golf course on the base “the perfect place” to construct the enormous lockup, which he insisted would be used for “temporary transit” while detainees await deportation to their home countries, or third countries if their home nations won’t take them.
Source: Brennan Center, AP News, USA Today, Washington Post
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