Donald Trump plans to enact the largest deportation in U.S. history, and private prisons are already sniffing the air at the “unprecedented opportunity” for moneymaking that a second Trump administration will offer.
It seems that investors are betting big on Trump’s plans to detain and then forcibly deport millions of both undocumented and legal immigrants—a move that could send the U.S. economy tumbling while making those who profit off of human suffering rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Geo Group, the country’s largest private prison company, was the biggest winner in the stock market after Trump’s victory was announced Wednesday, according to economic outlet Sherwood. The company saw a 40 percent jump in shares Wednesday alone, and its share price went from $14.18 the day before the election to $24.43 on Thursday.
In 2023, 43 percent of Geo Group’s top-line revenue, more than $2.4 billion, came from contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman, could barely contain his excitement during an earnings call Thursday. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals,” Zoley said, according to Bloomberg.
“This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he added.
Private prison executives also talked about expanding their services to meet the demand of the government’s plans. Zoley said that GEO Group was “well-positioned” to more than double its number of ICE detention beds, from 13,500 to “over 31,000 beds,” according to HuffPost.
They also discussed expanding their prisoner transport services, as well as their Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, which presents surveillance programs as “alternatives to detention.”
CEO Brian Evans said that the GEO Group’s ISAP programs currently had around 182,000 participants but could be scaled way, way up, to “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary.”
Signs indicate that ICE is already looking to expand this program in anticipation of Trump’s administration. HuffPost reported that CoreCivic, another private prison group, said that ICE had posted a request for information about ISAPs on Thursday, a precursor for contract proposals down the road.
It’s already begun: On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a vital Biden-era immigration policy that provided a pathway to citizenship for the thousands of undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
The policy, which the Biden administration called “Keep Families Together,” applied to those who have been in the country for 10 years or more, were not a security threat, and were safe from deportation under the “parole in place” program. They just needed to be married to U.S. citizens and complete an application for permanent residency. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that the policy would help 500,000 spouses and 50,000 stepchildren.
“Without this process, hundreds of thousands of noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to instead remain in the United States without lawful status, causing these families to live in fear and with uncertainty about their futures,” DHS wrote in an August statement.
Trump-appointed Texas-based U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker struck down the policy on the grounds that the Biden administration was abusing its power by circumventing Congress to enact the policy.
“The rule focuses on the wrong thing in identifying ‘significant public benefits’—the benefits of aliens’ new legal status, rather than their presence in this country,” Barker said in his decision. “The rule exceeds statutory authority and is not in accordance with law for this reason as well.”
This development is a grim precursor to an administration that has promised to break up more families in the “largest deportation program in American history.”
The Biden administration still has time to appeal the ruling.
Following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, Black people across the country are receiving racist text messages from anonymous senders.
Reports have come from locations as widespread as Washington, D.C., Alabama, Michigan, Georgia, South Carolina, and many, many other locations around the United States. The texts include messages telling the recipients that they have been “selected” to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.” Some of the messages include the person’s name.
Many of the texts are targeting Black college students, with reports coming from schools like Clemson University, Ohio State, and the University of Alabama, among others. Students at historically Black colleges and universities, such as Fisk University, have also reported receiving the texts. Some of the texts have “A TRUMP SUPPORTER” as a signature.
Many of the numbers seem to be tied to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable, “burner” phone numbers, according to........