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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 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 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. In February, Hininger called the Trump term “one of the most exciting periods in my career.”
There was high praise for the administration’s deadly spending bill, which cut Medicare, 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 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 after it cut loose the company in 2019.
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