Trump’s promise to arrest immigrants has destocked private prisons; Why did they fill up?

GEO Group and CoreCivic, the largest companies providing detention space for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appeared likely to reap a windfall after their shares soared in the weeks leading up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year.

But while Trump’s deportation machine has exploded, its reach has fallen short of Wall Street expectations. The stock prices of both companies fell. Despite a series of immigration attacks and high-profile raids, the government has not used as much detention space as investors expected.

Detention industry experts and other observers believe that could all change this year, with the immigration system — and private holding facilities — expected to expand even further.

“Once Trump was elected, there was a rush and belief that this would all happen with the snap of a finger,” said Joe Gomes, an equity analyst at Noble Capital Markets, an investment bank. “It just took a little longer than many investors thought for these numbers to really start to move up,” he said The Marshall Project.

On his first day in office, Trump revoked an executive order from former President Joe Biden to restrict the use of private companies to operate federal prisons for the Justice Department — although they continued to be used for immigration detention. Contractors such as GEO Group and its main competitor, CoreCivic, welcomed the news. Days later, the first piece of legislation Trump signed into law, the Laken Riley Lawmade it easier to detain undocumented immigrants accused of low-level crimes.

By early 2025, about a dozen prison facilities were vacant at the companies. ready to be reactivated. GEO Group, based near Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, seemed particularly suitable.

“This is a unique moment in our company’s history, and we believe we are well positioned to scale our diversified segments – in safe housing, transportation, electronic monitoring – to meet the evolving needs of this new administration and continue to drive value for our shareholders,” said George Zoley, the Greek-born founder of GEO Group, said during a quarterly earnings call in February.

By the summer, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law, approval of $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement.

Curiously, the price of GEO Group’s stock, which had nearly tripled between the final months of the presidential campaign and Inauguration Day, subsequently fell. At the end of 2025, shares of GEO Group were trading around $16 per share, down from a high of $36.46 on Trump’s second day in office. Stock prices also fell for CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America.

“Investors fell over their skies,” says Gomes, the analyst.

The Trump administration has said it plans to deport 1 million people a year. In December, the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, claimed it had deported 605,000 people since Trump’s election and that another 1.9 million had self-deported. The department dangled financial roots as a “free flight home for Christmas and $1,000.”

Arrests of immigrants increased. In December, ICE arrested 68,000 people nationwide, up from about 40,000 at the start of the year. That is recorded more than ever beforeyet only a quarter of these people had been convicted of a crime, including low-level offenses. Another 25% had criminal cases pending.

Detention capacity is still far from ICE’s stated goal of having access to more than 100,000 beds at a time to hold immigrants.

Early last year, GEO Group said it expected to provide 32,000 beds for ICE, more than double the number at the end of the Biden administration. In doing so, the company told investors that it was likely that all of its inactive prisons would be activated by the end of the year.

GEO Group resumed admitting immigrants into the 1,940-bed Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California after a COVID ban was lifted. On the East Coast, in Newark, New Jersey, GEO Group’s 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility opened with the help of a $1 billion ICE contract. In the Midwest, North Lake Processing Center, a notorious 1,800-bed facility in Baldwin, Michigan, also opened.

As of December 15, GEO Group had unused facilities with nearly 4,700 empty beds in California, Colorado, North Carolina and Texas, according to its report to investors.

CoreCivic also rose, but not as quickly as investors expected. Notably, the Tennessee-based company said in March that it has resumed “operations and care” for up to 2,400 people, including families, at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas. a contract is expected to generate $180 million in annual revenue.

“Never in our 42-year corporate history have we had as much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger, himself a former correctional officer, during an earnings call in May.

End of September CoreCivic reported that it had unused facilities with more than 7,000 empty beds.

By increasing pressure on stock prices, the federal government arrested fewer people at the American southern borderthus reducing the number of new entrants that need to be detained or monitored. Still, in DecemberGEO Group touted that the ‘alien population’ in the United States remains strong at 16.8 million, citing a figure from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce immigration. GEO Group also said 182,000 people in the community were being monitored for ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (compared to about 370,000 under the Biden administration).

Zoley said GEO Group subsidiary BI Incorporated could scale its monitoring contract to serve millions of people for ICE.

The Trump administration is also still ramping up its policies. And investors and observers expect the system to continue growing this year.

“As they expand their infrastructure — which includes officers, buildings, fleets, buses, planes, technology — we’ll probably see more people, more numbers involved in all of this,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a national human rights nonprofit that monitors the prison industry.

The Department of Homeland Security recently signed a $140 million contract to purchase aircraft from Boeing deportations. Thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol agents are being recruited, with more on offer Signing bonuses of $50,000 to come out of retirement. More local police and sheriff’s departments have formal agreements to support national immigration enforcement efforts.

The White House and ICE see publicly traded private prison companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic as “allies and assets” in their ongoing efforts to deport many more people, said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“The contractors are the result of this government’s policy choice,” he said.

And as a libertarian, he said he sees illegal immigration as the result of a broken immigration system. He described the Trump administration’s immigration policies as “arbitrary mass deportation.”

“If you go down the list, it’s hard to find a right in the Constitution that they haven’t violated,” he said. “I find it incredibly disturbing that they have been able to get away with it so far.”

He said trying to open 100,000 ICE detention beds across the country is an “absurd goal” that would have required the administration to arrest people for a much broader set of reasons than previous administrations have used.

“There aren’t enough criminal immigrants in the United States to catch to fill those facilities, so this is all about locking up a bunch of peaceful people who aren’t bothering anyone,” Bier said.

He expects the Trump administration to exceed its detention bed goal.

“They could easily be at 200,000 by the end of this term,” he said. “The main constraint would just be the staff to staff that. You have to find real people who are willing to do this work. But if you’re just paying for it, they got a lot more money than they could ever spend on this.”

Gomes, the analyst, said that as ICE employs more people, it could improve GEO Group and CoreCivic’s financial results.

“As those employees take office, you will see an increase in arrests,” he said.

This story was produced by The Marshall Project and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

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