Why ICE Is Quietly Buying Up Private Detention Centers

The announcement didn’t make much news initially. CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison operators in the country, announced early last month that the U.S. government was buying two of its facilities for $1.5 billion. Both sites are set to be used the same way they have for years—as detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).The deal was the latest twist in the Trump Administration’s fumbling efforts to dramatically expand the number of migrants it can hold at once. Over the last year and a half, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has veered from planning to reopen more than a dozen shuttered prisons, to housing thousands of migrants in sprawling tent facilities, to retrofitting nearly a dozen commercial warehouses into new detention centers. Despite billions of dollars spent, each strategy has largely fallen by the wayside, stymied by legal and political headwinds. The latest plan, according to ICE sources and officials with private prison companies, is for ICE to take over private detention facilities while building new ones alongside them. Officials with CoreCivic and the GEO Group, the two biggest owners of private ICE detention ...