Portside

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.

or 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 work” claim is a common refrain from private prison companies, which still spend millions lobbying lawmakers in Washington every year on everything from prison construction to border security. “Private prison companies… will tell you that they do not push policymakers toward or away from enacting laws or creating policies that would feed more people into their surveillance pipeline,” said García Hernández. 

“That’s a little hard to believe,” he continued. “There are few private businesses in any marketplace that do not have an interest in seeing their revenue sources grow.”

“Very Harmful” Surveillance

Currently, at any given time, there are around 30,000 immigrants locked up in ICE detention centers around the country, largely in facilities managed by private prison companies. But there are millions more people — whether asylum seekers, people with revoked visas, or undocumented workers — with ongoing cases in immigration court who are not in detention. ICE calls this the “non-detained docket.”

While ICE claims that it detains immigrants who pose a threat or are deemed a flight risk, it’s often not entirely clear why some people are detained during their immigration proceedings while others are released. The agency’s surveillance measures are similarly arbitrary. Around 182,000 people are currently subjected to immigration surveillance, which the agency refers to as its “alternatives to detention” programs. (The Intensive Supervision Appearance Program is the primary such program.)

Some are forced to wear ankle monitors, while others must “check in” with ICE periodically on a facial recognition-empowered smartphone app. Most recently, ICE has rolled out surveillance “watches,” wrist-worn tracking devices.

This surveillance, warned Evan Benz, a senior attorney for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, is “often very harmful.” Not only are ankle monitors and similar devices stigmatizing, but they have also been known to cause physical injuries like inflammation and bleeding, and in some cases, electrocuting wearers. Onerous check-in or curfew requirements can make it difficult to work or even to sleep. And there are endless privacy concerns around how ICE tracks and uses immigrants’ data.

Already, this surveillance is deployed widely; tens of thousands more immigrants are surveilled by ICE than are locked up in immigration detention. But 182,000 is a small number compared to the number of people in the U.S. with pending immigration cases; last fall, ICE estimated there were 5.7 million people in immigration proceedings.

For more than a year, conservative lawmakers and private prison companies have supported expanding ICE’s surveillance regime far beyond its current scope — from the 182,000 people enrolled in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program to all 5.7 million people with pending immigration cases. 

This proposal first surfaced last August, when ICE quietly released a request for information — a notice to its vendors — that it intended to create a single program, called Release and Reporting Management, to oversee people in immigration proceedings. While the program included some social services, its central element was the expansion of electronic monitoring, seemingly to everyone with a pending immigration case.

Private prison companies quickly took notice. 

Currently, ICE’s surveillance arsenal is primarily provided by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group. In 2020, the company won a five-year contract, valued at $2.2 billion, to administer ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. Since then, the number of people surveilled by the program has nearly doubled — a windfall for the GEO Group.

“That business, which has 50 percent margins, could be substantially higher next year if this comes through, is that correct?” one GEO Group investor asked on an earnings call last November, referring to the planned expansion of the program. The GEO Group’s CEO concurred.

“Money From These Companies Drives Policies”

Over the last year, as ICE pondered its own expansion, lawmakers have introduced multiple proposals to place millions of immigrants under electronic monitoring — encouraged by the private prison industry, which has been lobbying on these bills.

In September 2023, the House version of the 2024 Department of Homeland Security appropriations package — the legislation that allocates funding to ICE — contained a provision that mirrored ICE’s August surveillance proposals. The bill would have required anyone with a pending immigration court case to be “enrolled into the Alternatives to Detention Program with mandatory GPS monitoring.”

The bill was opposed by the Biden White House and did not survive negotiations. But it was not the last time such a requirement made its way into legislation. 

In May, Rep. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) introduced legislation, the “Reshape Alternatives to Detention Act,” that would require “mandatory GPS monitoring” for all immigrants with pending court cases.

Hagerty was considered a likely Trump cabinet pick, though was passed over for secretary of state. His home state of Tennessee is also home to CoreCivic’s headquarters, where the company wields significant influence over state lawmakers. CoreCivic’s CEO, Damon Hininger, has contributed more than $10,000 to Hagerty’s campaigns since 2019.

Then, this summer, the House Appropriations Committee released its 2025 plans for ICE funding. Once again, lawmakers proposed mandatory electronic monitoring for people in immigration proceedings. “Any attempt to wind down or underutilize the program will be met with strict scrutiny from the Committee and other congressional oversight entities,” lawmakers warned.

Such an increase would be costly. A June House report on the bill explains that the package is proposing a $30 million increase for ICE’s surveillance program for 2025, from $320 million in 2024 to $350 million.

The bill “is really indicative of the influence that private companies have in shaping immigration enforcement policies,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, a human rights and legal advocacy group. Franzblau noted that the GEO Group and CoreCivic both have lobbied extensively on the appropriations bills. 

The bill allocates, for instance, $5 million in funding specifically for a new “monitoring pilot program” for “wearable technologies” that provide biometric identification capabilities — language that seems tailored to the GEO Group’s new VeriWatch technology, which claims to be the “first community supervision location tracker to biometrically authenticate the identity of the wearer.” 

Private prison companies have been lobbying on Hagerty’s bill and other proposals, federal lobbying disclosures show. The GEO Group reported lobbying on the Reshape Alternatives to Detention Act last quarter. So did the corporate-backed Heritage Foundation, through its lobbying arm Heritage Action for America, and the far-right, white-supremacist-linked organization Federation for American Immigration Reform, which pushes anti-immigrant policies.

“Money from these companies drives policies,” said Franzblau. “Why we’re here and facing this pending tragic attack on immigrant communities is in large part because of the incentivized nature of the immigration enforcement apparatus, where these companies play a major role in driving up enforcement.”

Trump’s win comes at a critical moment for the future of ICE’s surveillance regime. The GEO Group’s contract to run the Intensive Supervision and Appearance Program expires at the end of July 2025, giving ICE the opportunity to potentially reimagine its surveillance apparatus in the next year. 

Now with a GOP trifecta of power looming, the agency may be even more empowered to do so. And while Trump has promised mass immigrant deportations, the political and financial limitations to such an ambitious plan might make surveillance a tempting fallback for Republicans, some advocates say.

For Benz, the attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the GOP’s recent push to increase funding for ICE’s surveillance represented some recognition that there was “no cost-effective or practical way for ICE to lawfully detain and remove all three-plus million migrants on the non-detained docket, despite what Trump and his fascist minions may be dreaming of for next year.”

Benz and others will be closely tracking the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program over the next year. For advocates, the program’s contract expiration is “a potential opportunity for advocacy to try to leverage some congressional oversight and try to get terms that are slightly more favorable,” said Benz.

“On the other side, it’s an opportunity for [surveillance contractors] to really push for a lot of additional funding from ICE,” Benz said.

===

Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The Intercept, the Baffler, the American Prospect, and elsewhere.