For 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 November 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 November 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, US 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…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
