This article was originally published by The Lever, an investigative newsroom. If you like this story, sign up for The Lever’s free newsletter.
For the last year, private prison companies and corporate interests have been quietly lobbying to place millions of immigrants under electronic surveillance, according to records uncovered by The Lever. Now that a second Trump administration will soon assume power, with a former prison lobbyist set to be his top legal adviser, there are signs the plans are already moving forward.
Former president Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 5 was immediately seen as a clear win for the private prison industry. The stocks of the world’s biggest private prison companies soared in the wake of the election, and investors openly salivated over the potential profits they could see from a Trump immigration regime.
“We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services,” one private prison executive told investors on a Nov. 7 earnings call.
Trump’s latest pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, is a former lobbyist for the GEO Group, one of the world’s biggest prison companies, another sign of the influence the industry may wield under the new administration.
A core profit driver for longtime immigration vendors like the GEO Group is electronic monitoring: the ankle bracelets, GPS trackers, and facial recognition technology that the government deploys on tens of thousands of immigrants across the country, threatening their privacy and well-being, as well as disrupting families and communities. Advocates warn such an expansion would intensify the harms that surveillance can inflict, often with little oversight.
Over the last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been pondering a massive expansion of its surveillance regime. Last fall, under the Biden administration, a proposal surfaced to put as many as five million immigrants under electronic monitoring, as The Lever reported at the time.
Since then, according to records reviewed by The Lever, GOP lawmakers — egged on by private prison companies and even the Heritage Foundation, the corporate-backed right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025 — have pushed to drastically expand surveillance. Republican lawmakers proposed in June a combined $35 million increase to ICE’s budget to bring millions of people under electronic monitoring.
In the wake of the election, there are now signs that ICE is gearing up to bring these plans to fruition. As Wired recently reported, on Nov. 6, the day after Trump’s victory, ICE issued a notice to private surveillance companies, signaling that it was seeking new vendors for its flagship surveillance program, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program.
For private prison executives, the notice was telling. Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, another private prison company that does business with ICE, told shareholders on the company’s earnings call earlier this month that the timing with the election was “probably not a coincidence.”
The plan to expand ICE’s surveillance regime predates Trump’s win — and can be traced in part to the powerful private prison lobby in Washington. As César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor of immigration law at Ohio State University, emphasized, the influence of private prison companies has been a constant in recent years.
“President-elect Trump is certainly bombastic, and we can certainly expect that his election is going to bring good fortune to private prison companies,” he said. “But under President Biden, they’ve had plenty of business too.”
The GEO Group did not respond to The Lever’s request for comment. Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, wrote that the company “has a long-standing, zero-tolerance policy not to advocate for or against any legislation that serves as the basis for — or determines the duration of — an individual’s detention.”
This “no advocacy........