Inside The Plan To Let Trump Track Millions of Immigrants
Magdalana Domingo Ramirez Lopez wears an electronic ankle monitor after an immigration raid in Greenville, South Carolina. (AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain)
The private prison lobby has been quietly pushing a drastic expansion of ICE’s surveillance apparatus. Trump’s reelection may be the final step.
or 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’s victory on Nov. 5 was immediately seen as a clear win for the private prison industry. The stocks of the world’s biggest private prison companies soared in the wake of the election, and investors openly salivated over 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.
Trump’s latest pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, 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, and facial recognition technology that the government deploys on tens of thousands of immigrants 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 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 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 that authored Project 2025 — have pushed to drastically expand surveillance. Republican lawmakers proposed in June 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, on Nov. 6, the day after Trump’s victory, ICE issued a notice to private surveillance companies, signaling that it was seeking new vendors for its flagship surveillance program, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program.
For private prison executives, the notice was telling. Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, another private prison company that does business with ICE, told shareholders 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 from private prison companies, which still spend millions lobbying lawmakers in Washington every year on everything from prison construction to border security. “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. 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.”
While ICE claims that it detains immigrants who pose a threat or are deemed a flight risk, it’s often not entirely clear why 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, which the agency 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. Most recently, ICE has rolled out surveillance “watches,” wrist-worn tracking devices.