Among his barrage of day-one executive orders, President Trump signed a measure reversing a Biden administration policy that barred contracts between the Department of Justice and private detention centers. The executive order will affect contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service, which combined currently have more than 200,000 people in their custody.
The largest federal prison contractor, the GEO Group, was a large donor to Trump’s campaign, and now a new federal filing shows that the second-largest one, CoreCivic, is a major inaugural donor. According to a lobbying disclosure posted yesterday, CoreCivic donated $500,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee on Dec. 19.
On the company’s Q3 earnings call, held on Nov. 7, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors that he wouldn’t be surprised to see the Biden administration’s private prison ban overturned early on by the Trump administration.
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Hininger also said that he expects the election results to lead to an “increased need for detention capacity” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. “So how we’re approaching that is that we have about 18,000 vacant beds in our system, and that includes our beds that we had available in Dilley, Texas,” Hininger said regarding the company’s preparations for detaining undocumented immigrants. “We are taking proactive steps and working on the plan to activate and make available every single bed that we’ve got in the enterprise.”
Besides detention beds, Hininger said that his company is ready to help the federal government in other ways. “One thing we think that we’re probably going to need is additional transportation resources,” Hininger said. “And with our wholly-owned subsidiary, TransCor, who has got decades of experience on working with our federal partners, both the Marshals Service and ICE, we’ve got the capability and the leadership in place to scale up and provide additional capacity if there’s transportation needed, primarily on ground transportation, but also we’ve got the competency to do air transportation too.”
Hininger donated $300,000 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee last year, according to Federal Election Commission records. The GEO Group subsidiary GEO Acquisitions II donated $1 million to the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super PAC in 2024.
The stock prices of both CoreCivic and the GEO Group have both nearly doubled since Trump was elected.
GEO Group recently hired a career ICE official, Daniel Bible, as an executive vice president, the Project On Government Oversight reported. Bible, who had been in charge of the agency’s detainment of undocumented immigrants, raised the issues of more bed space and monitoring technology in a February 2024 briefing with former President Biden.
CoreCivic employs Trump ally and fundraiser Jeff Miller as a federal lobbyist. According to Miller’s disclosure covering Q4 of last year, he represented the company on “Issues pertaining to the construction and management of privately-operated prisons and detention facilities” and “Issues related to prisoner re-entry programs and facilities.” Miller’s firm, Miller Strategies, was paid $140,000 by CoreCivic last year.
According to data from USA Spending, CoreCivic has had contracts worth more than $6 billion with the Department of Justice since 2000.
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