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**AUGUST 8, 2025**
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It’s jarring to listen to private prison company earnings calls after spending time in immigration court, watching people face masked agents, not knowing whether they’re on the secret deportation list or not. The people who show up to their appointments are vibrating with anxiety, some so nervous they can’t sleep the night before, some weeping. Some whom agents abduct are so horrified they become sick to their stomach. Some cry out and fall to the ground. Even the lucky ones who make it out of the building and back home are traumatized by the experience and left with the distinct impression that they are unwelcome in this country. In one encounter I saw on Tuesday, a slight, older immigrant struggled to respond to an increasingly angry agent, who ultimately let him go. As the man walked away, the agent snarled at him, “Answer the questions better next time.”
In the world of finance, though, it’s a big lovefest over great financial results [link removed]. Executives talked about the “good news” of the GOP mass deportations; analysts congratulated them over stock buybacks. Everyone was friendly and everyone was looking forward to the future. The waiting music for one call was interesting acoustic guitar jazz. The other was Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” a song about romance. The extreme contrast makes me think that the only American dream still alive is the dream of the wealthy.
**–Whitney Curry Wimbish, staff writer**
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NICK INGRAM/AP PHOTO
Private Prisons Cash In on Trump’s Mass Deportations [link removed]
America’s two biggest private prison companies have made even more money from Trump’s mass deportation campaign than executives’ wildest hopes. In second-quarter earnings calls this week, executives at both GEO Group and CoreCivic announced revenue increases of over 100 percent compared to the same period last year, described buybacks of millions of dollars’ worth of stock, and outlined plans for the day after Trump achieves his goal of deporting one million immigrants this year, which they paradoxically expect will net even bigger piles of cash. Both revised their outlook for the rest of the year upwards.
At GEO Group, the largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), **executives reported** [link removed] total revenue for the period of $636.2 million, about a 5 percent increase from the second quarter of 2024. Net income was $29.1 million for the period, compared to a net loss of $32.5 million last year. The company will buy back $300 million in company stock, executives announced, a maneuver companies perform to boost their share price higher when they have excess cash on hand or their stock is already on the rise.
There are “unprecedented growth opportunities in front of our company,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman of the board, said on his company’s earnings call Wednesday.
CoreCivic had a similar story. Total revenue was $538.2 million, a nearly 10 percent increase from the second quarter last year, **executives said** [link removed] on their earnings call the next day. Net income was $38.5 million, compared with $19.0 million a year ago. They, too, are in the midst of a stock buyback spree, with permission from the board to repurchase $500 million worth of outstanding shares.
“We’ve had a tremendous, tremendous second quarter,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger. “We’re gonna have a very strong year.”
Executives at both companies have been delighting at their prospects for the Trump presidency**since before the inauguration** [link removed]. In February, Hininger called the Trump term “**one of the most exciting periods in my career** [link removed].”
There was high praise for the administration’s deadly spending bill, which cut**Medicare** [link removed], Medicaid, food assistance, and other federal services for the needy while giving tax breaks to the richest people in the country. The Big Beautiful Bill also tripled the base budget for ICE and **allocated $45 billion** [link removed] to build new immigration detention centers.
In an example of how fortunes have changed for private prison firms in the Trump era, Bank of America recently **took back CoreCivic as a client** [link removed] after it cut loose the company in 2019.
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