For Private Prison Companies, Surveilling Immigrants Is the Next Big Windfall
ICE is considering a new program that could subject more than 5 million immigrants to intensive, intrusive surveillance. Private prison contractors hope to make big bucks off the program — and are spending millions to make sure it passes.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent conducts a search on April 28, 2010, in Phoenix, Arizona. (John Moore / Getty Images)
As the country’s immigration agency ponders a significant expansion of its vast, troubled immigrant surveillance regime, private prison companies are telling investors that the proposal could bring significant profits — and are deploying lobbyists to fight to fund it.
In separate calls with investors last month, executives with two of the world’s largest private prison companies, the GEO Group and CoreCivic, said they were focused on a new proposal to radically expand an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surveillance program. According to the plan, the program, which currently keeps tabs on nearly 200,000 immigrants using technologies like ankle bracelets and facial-recognition apps, could eventually track millions of people who are caught in the immigration system.
ICE’s surveillance programs have been a focus of the companies’ multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts in Washington this year, the latest example of how private incentives are shaping ICE’s vast, and growing, surveillance regime.