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INSIDE THE PLAN TO LET TRUMP TRACK MILLIONS OF IMMIGRANTS  
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Katya Schwenk
November 26, 2024
The Lever
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_ The private prison lobby has been quietly pushing a drastic
expansion of ICE’s surveillance apparatus. Trump’s reelection may
be the final step. _

Magdalana Domingo Ramirez Lopez wears an electronic ankle monitor
after an immigration raid in Greenville, South Carolina. , AP
Photo/Mary Ann Chastain

 

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
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was immediately seen as a clear win for the private prison industry.
The stocks of the world’s biggest private prison companies soared
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in the wake of the election, and investors openly salivated over
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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
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Trump’s latest pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi,
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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
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facial recognition technology that the government deploys on tens of
thousands of immigrants
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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
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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
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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
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that authored Project 2025
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drastically expand surveillance. Republican lawmakers proposed in June
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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
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Nov. 6, the day after Trump’s victory, ICE issued a notice
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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
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told shareholders
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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
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from private prison companies, which still spend millions
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lobbying lawmakers in Washington every year on everything from prison
construction
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to border security
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“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
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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.
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While ICE claims that it detains immigrants who pose a threat or are
deemed a flight risk, it’s often not entirely clear why
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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
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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
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recently, ICE has rolled out surveillance “watches,” wrist-worn
tracking devices
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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
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inflammation and bleeding
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and in some cases, electrocuting wearers. Onerous check-in or curfew
requirements can make it difficult to work
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or even to sleep
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And there are endless privacy concerns
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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
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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
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last August, when ICE quietly released
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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
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valued at $2.2 billion
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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
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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
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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
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But it was not the last time such a requirement made its way into
legislation. 

In May, Rep. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) introduced legislation
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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
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passed over for secretary of state.
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His home state of Tennessee is also home to CoreCivic’s
headquarters, where the company wields significant influence
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over state lawmakers. CoreCivic’s CEO, Damon Hininger, has
contributed more than $10,000
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to Hagerty’s campaigns since 2019.

Then, this summer, the House Appropriations Committee released its
2025 plans for ICE funding
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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
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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
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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
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on the Reshape Alternatives to Detention Act last quarter. So did the
corporate-backed Heritage Foundation, through its lobbying arm
Heritage Action for America
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and the far-right, white-supremacist-linked organization
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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
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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
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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.

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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.

* Immigration; ICE; National Politics; Supervision Appearance
Program;
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