How Private Prisons Get Rich Off ICE

Empty beds don’t generate revenue - but occupied ones do.

Our first episode dives into ICE and the private prison system - where the math of corruption is clearest. The moment someone is detained, the meter starts running.

Human beings become revenue.

And if that system runs out of people, it doesn’t just disappear.

This isn’t just about immigration.

It’s about a model-profit over people- that shows up everywhere.

CHAPTER 1: The Meter is Running

Nick Valencia:

We’ve all seen the videos by now. The shaky cellphone footage. The agents in plainclothes. A person is grabbed, handcuffed and put in the back of an unmarked vehicle. And then the video ends. But that’s when the real story begins. The moment that door slams shut, the meter starts running. Not metaphorically. Literally. And that industry runs on human beings. Every day they stay locked up, the meter keeps running.

And here’s the part that should stop you cold: Many of these people in custody, they haven’t even been convicted of a crime.

Some haven’t even been charged.

For the most part, people detained by ICE are pretrial detainees. No sentence, no verdict. Just a body in a bed billed to taxpayers. Your tax dollars are being spent to keep them in custody.

Each person detained in ICE custody generates roughly between $27,000 and $35,000 per month. That comes out to about $900 to $1100 per day per bed, per person.

Your money. Your federal income taxes.

The same year schools said that they didn’t have enough funding. The same year you were told there wasn’t enough money, there was always enough money to fill another bed.

We’re going to take you past the viral videos and to the truth behind those locked doors. At a time when the powerful peddle fear without truth, we’re here to speak truth without fear. I’m Nick Valencia, and this is Corruption Inc.

The corruption is right in front of our face every single day.

It’s become the American way.

That’s not being dramatic or poetic. That’s 20 plus years of journalism experience out there on the streets, talking to you and building trust. Because I come with receipts. I’ve reported from courtrooms, disaster zones, neighborhoods under surveillance. And yes, I’ve been in those back rooms with those fat cats.

People have big feelings about immigration, and I feel like I’ve heard them all. They argue about the border and politics and presidents. But what I’m here to show you is that beneath all that noise is something far more sinister and in my eyes, far more dangerous. A business model that treats human beings like line items. A system where suffering isn’t a failure.

It’s part of the revenue stream.

And once those doors close, the accountability stops. People stop being parents, neighbors, workers, and instead they’re looked at as products. The same logic shows up everywhere in America. Anywhere profit is put ahead of people and oversight is treated as optional.

If you’re watching this and thinking that this is about Republicans or Democrats, it isn’t.

ICE outsources roughly 91% of its detention beds to the private sector. Under Bush, under Obama. Under Trump. This didn’t start under one administration, but it is certainly expanding rapidly right now because detention is now a growth sector. What that tells us clearly is that this isn’t about public safety, and it isn’t about order. It certainly isn’t about justice either.

It’s about revenue.

And every filled bed means a check. Every delayed hearing means more money. Private prison executives? They don’t hide this anymore. On earnings calls, they describe detention numbers as, quote, “fantastic growth opportunities.” They reassure investors that demand is strong, capacity is expanding, and business is booming.

And here’s the question that no one asks out loud. Once President Trump deports 1 million people as projected, do you really think that they’re going to stop at the undocumented? Do you really think that these private prisons are just going to close up their billion dollar facilities?

So who comes next after all the immigrants are rounded up?

Profit centers don’t disappear. They get repurposed. Once detention becomes an industry, the incentive is not justice.

It’s money.

It’s inventory.

And once you understand that, you stop arguing about immigration and you start asking: Who is profiting?

CHAPTER 2: Carlos Della Valle

When a suspected undocumented immigrant is taken into custody, they might be held in federal immigration detention for 72 hours. But that’s not a long term solution. And federal prisons are already crowded enough with people who have actually been convicted of crimes.

But for pretrial detainees like Carlos Della Valle, their destination is more than likely a private prison owned and operated by a for profit, publicly traded company.

ICE catches them, and businesses like CoreCivic, Geo Group and LaSalle management take it from there. Carlos has been married to his American born wife, Angela, for more than 23 years. She’s a Pennsylvania schoolteacher, and together they raised a son and sent him to college. But it was on August 8th that the family’s life changed forever, and so has their bank account.

In the six months since he’s been in custody, Carlos has been transferred 16 times across multiple states and U.S. territories. And these transfers, they feel less like logistics and more like an opportunity to make money off a man who’s been here for 30 years.

Every transfer? Taxpayer funded.

Every bed? Taxpayer funded.

And the families impacted by this, they feel it immediately.

Paying for phone calls where sometimes the money they put in the account doesn’t show up at all. Paying for video calls that get cut short. Paying to make detention slightly more bearable for their loved ones.

And the cruelty isn’t accidental. It’s efficient.

Missed visits, endless waiting messages that never get delivered. Brown drinking water. Food that barely qualifies as sustenance.

The point is pressure. The point is exhaustion. The point is to make daily life so unbearable that people just give up.

Sound familiar?

And even though Carlos has been here for nearly 30 years, paid taxes, built a good life, moved in good faith, there has never been a pathway for him for citizenship. But it’s not only Carlos who’s had to endure the conditions of the Wind Correctional Center and Wind Parish, Louisiana, run by LaSalle management.

Listen to this message that his wife Angela sent me after one of her visits:

Angela Della Valle:

The men who get deported. What he said is that when they get called out, they just take all their things, are told to take their mattress. And there’s a hallway in this. In this somewhere between where the men are kept. And they literally just throw the mattresses there, you know? And Carlos said, like he said, it’s a mess, you know?

But it just reminded me. I know they’re not routinely gassing these men, at least not physically, but it reminded me of the Holocaust. All the uniforms and shoes, you know? From those prisoners, from those human beings who were treated... That were not treated as human beings.

Nick Valencia:

Very much like the other stories that we’ve heard from countless people who have loved ones in detention, there is little to no basic medical care. They ask the question, what happened to the Hippocratic oath of doing no harm?

One of the threads that we’re hearing about the medical care is that people are told that they’ll get what they need if they just self-deport and go back to where they came from.

Angela and her family have spent more than $48,000 in legal fees since Carlos was taken into custody. This is a snapshot of their expenses between September and mid-November. More than $1,300 in calls, more than $1,000 on their commissary. And every day he’s inside, you’re paying to detain him, and his wife is spending money to try to get him out.

And these companies are double dipping on both ends. We submitted a request to LaSalle Management to visit Winn. It was so difficult to try to find them to begin with, but once we did, they responded almost immediately to tell us that we had to reach out to ICE. We did. ICE never responded. And just like that, responsibility vanishes in the gaps.

And meanwhile, the business continues to churn inside. At the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, where Carlos is being held, everything costs money. From warm clothes to a cup of ramen.

Phone calls? Those are $5 just for 20 minutes.

Some of those people inside, they could resolve their immigration status in weeks. Instead, they continue to waste away inside these private prisons, sometimes for months.

Why?

Because the meter runs daily.

The companies that keep coming up in these facilities are ones that you have probably never heard of: Correct Solutions. Access Corrections. Jail ATM. Keefe Commissary Network. Homewav.

These businesses drain the individuals from the inside out.

CHAPTER 3: August Spurling

That much is clear to Taylor Spurling, whose fiancé August has been detained alongside Carlos for months.

Taylor Spurling:

The water is brown. It is not really drinkable. All their food is made in it. You know, they’re able to buy stuff like ramen from the commissary, and even that has to be made with that water. So what they do is they get ice from the ice machine and they melt it in the microwave. And that’s how they drink water.

They’re woken up at 4 a.m. in the morning to go have breakfast every morning. And the breakfast is minimal, you know. They have to walk outside and it’s cold out. They do not get warm clothes given to them. They have to buy that from the commissary. It’s an extreme amount of money compared to the amount of everything else that’s in there and the amount of money that people are already spending on lawyers and to even communicate with them, it costs money.

You know, it’s like $5 for 20 minutes of conversation. So everything in there costs money. Our tax money is paying for every single person that is held in ICE detention, that is held in these facilities.

Our tax money pays to get them there.

Our tax money pays to hold them there.

Our tax money pays to deport them.

And there are so many people that are in there right now that are either completely legal or have just a small little issue with their status that it will take, you know, a week or two, going to an immigration office to fix.

And yet we’re paying thousands of dollars just to hold them.

You know, we are wasting more money doing this than allowing them the freedom to get out and do it. Because especially when they’re in there, they have no ability to quickly solve these things. You know, what could take a couple weeks will take six months.

And that’s our money that’s paying for them while it’s happening. And it’s just, there’s a lot that I’ve figured out throughout this process that I had no idea about until I was in it.

Nick Valencia

Turning lives into line items. And as long as that business model survives, the shell game will continue efficiently and at an enormous profit.

And while the couple drain their savings, you’re paying to detain him.

CHAPTER 4: How it all started

Companies got involved in the private prison business long before Donald Trump’s presidency. It was in 1987 that the company that would eventually turn into Geo Group won its first government contract with the Aurora Processing Center in Colorado.

It was during the second Bush presidency, and even under President Obama, that these companies expanded and started playing a bigger role in holding people after they crossed the border, deeply entrenching themselves into our immigration system. For years, across both Democrat and Republican administrations, business was great for anyone who was able to get one of these types of government contracts.

But it’s under President Trump’s second term that business is really booming. America’s two leading private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, were among President Trump’s biggest donors to his campaign and to his super PACs, investing more than $2.7 million. CoreCivic even bestowed over $500,000 for President Trump’s inauguration. Since then, it looks like the Trump administration has paid them back in full, and it’s expanded since the 2024 election.

CoreCivic stock jumped from $13 to $22 in one week. In that same time, Geo Group stock jumped from $15 to $25. Investors weren’t reacting to the rhetoric. They were reacting to the projected detention volume. In a recent report, DHS talked about expanding and exploring to military sites, and Congress has allotted more than $45 billion to expand detention capacity.

That money, it didn’t materialize out of thin air. That’s taxpayer funded, paid for by you.

DHS has spent more than $690 million acquiring seven warehouses across multiple states to expand its detention infrastructure. Since Trump and Republicans in Congress took power last year they have roughly tripled ISIS funding - making ICE the highest funded US law enforcement agency.

And giving Ice an additional $75 billion to spend through 2028.

They’ve also diverted at least $2 billion from military funding to support ICE operations.

Take a look at the numbers.

Over the course of the last year, as apprehensions along the southwest part of the border have dropped, all across the country the population inside ice detentions is steadily rising. In August 2025, Geo Group reported a revenue for its quarter at more than $636 million, beating analysts’ predictions.

George Zoley, the chief executive at Geo Group, recently said on an earnings call that their detention facilities “have never been more full.” CoreCivic meanwhile, they reported more than $538 million in revenue. Just five months into President Trump’s second term, the CEO at CoreCivic, Damon Henninger, said on his earnings call that “never in our 42 year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.”

The Trump administration wants to more than double the detention capacity from 50,000 beds to well over 100,000, perhaps even as high as 150,000.

And they’ll probably get it.

Geo Group, for instance, is a company that is very friendly with the Trump administration. Trump’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, is a former lobbyist for the Geo Group as recently as 2019.

During Bondi’s nomination hearings, the National Immigrant Justice Center submitted a statement opposing her appointment, citing her problematic role as a lobbyist for the country’s largest private prison company. As President Trump’s nominee, she also would be poised to advance a mass detention and deportation agenda that would benefit her former client, Geo Group. This affiliation presents serious concerns as to Miss Bondi’s ability to perform her role as attorney general and chief law enforcement officer with impartiality.

In fact, it’s a number of officials in the Trump administration that have ties to this unprecedented spending for DHS. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin is abruptly leaving the Trump administration amid turmoil that she is personally and financially benefiting from this historic spending by DHS. In November, a bombshell report revealed that McLaughlin’s husband’s PR firm inked a more than $230 million deal for advertising and public relations.

CHAPTER 5: Masuma Kahn

Just over an hour outside of Los Angeles, far away from the cameras and the courtrooms, is one of CoreCivic’s newest facilities: a place that not only holds bodies but breaks down lives.

And one of those lives is 64 year old Masuma Khan. After decades in the United States and repeatedly presenting herself at her USCIS hearings, Masuma Khan was taken unexpectedly into custody and is now facing deportation.

She was held inside of the California City CoreCivic detention facility for four weeks, and it was during this time that survival became an act of resistance itself. And it was her daughter who understood that the law alone would not save her mother. But visibility might. Using her law school background and her proficiency in social media, she began to spread the message about her mother.

And that might be the most damning truth of all: in America’s private prison detention it’s not just the law, but those that know how to fight after the doors close that end up winning. Masuma Khan’s is one of the few stories out there about someone who has spent an extensive period of time in detention and was able to come out the other side.

It’s because of that we were able to learn the horrific details and circumstances in which she was held.

Masuma Khan

There was no mattress, nothing on it, just simple the floor. Chief from CoreCivic, she came. They said, “No, we are not going to provide any more water.” Because girls are complaining. Everyone’s like it’s a little smelly or sometimes it is brown.

Nick Valencia

That the water smelled?

Masuma Khan

Yeah, so. But the chief says, “No, I don’t see any stinky” or like that.

Says “You can drink from your room, cell.” So I said “The same water going to the toilet? How do you want me to drink? You need to drink first and show us how to drink it.’

Nick Valencia

Did they drink the water?

Masuma Khan

No.

Nick Valencia

But they expected you to.

Masuma Khan

Yeah, but he said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Nick Valencia

It isn’t just the companies that are squeezing from the top. Now, in order to maximize profits, they squeeze from the bottom too. Inside, everything costs money. Soap, a toothbrush, a phone call, even a sweater - something that’s desperately needed during those cold desert nights.

Masuma Khan

Also, here is freezing temperature everywhere.

Nick Valencia

You were cold in there, and if you needed a sweater, everything was... You had to pay for it.

Masuma Khan

They gave us a uniform and t-shirts inside and a uniform, but it’s like a half sleeve. So we need to cover. So let alone other people, they find out the socks can help a little bit. So we start using socks on our arms to cover our hands. And when I got so cold I put socks on my neck.

Nick Valencia

And if that wasn’t enough, getting health care inside the facility for these pretrial detainees was nothing short of a nightmare. A recent report by Disability Rights California found that even though leadership at the facility says they provide basic medical care, nearly every detainee that the DRC interviewed reported disability related concerns, including not having access to basic medical care.

The DRC also found that the facility employs staff who harass detainees and unnecessarily use solitary confinement for punishment. For the record, according to DHS’ own policy, detention is supposed to be non punitive.

Remember, most of these people are still waiting on a court date. They’re pretrial detainees. But life is so insufferable inside that we’ve heard story after story of people voluntarily signing deportation orders.

That’s exactly what they tried to do to Masuma Khan when they woke her up in the middle of the night and drove her three hours to the Los Angeles International Airport with the intention of getting her to sign her voluntary deportation.

Masuma Khan

I am like taking medicine for my blood pressure, my diabetes. So I was shaking in the middle of the night. They wake me up, so shaking, shaking and kind of stuff and I was like, panic at that. Then they says, “let’s go.”

I said, “I need to call my family because I know what’s going on now. What is next.”

So I try to call, They say, “No, you cannot call. After you go back to your country, you can call.”

Nick Valencia

They had every intention of getting you on that plane to try to get you to go. And you’re there by yourself. There’s no one advocating for you. You’re having to advocate for yourself.

Masuma Khan

Right.

Nick Valencia

And tell me how you stood up for yourself.

Masuma Khan

I’m thinking this is my country because this is the country of immigrants. And I was telling them, “This is the country of immigrants. Where is the humanitarian things? No, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave because my family, I want to stay with my family. I’m not going.”

Nick Valencia

Masuma refused to board the plane. And commercial airlines won’t take detainees who don’t sign their own voluntary deportation. That might have saved Masuma that day, but it also might not save other detainees for much longer.

CHAPTER 6: Taxpayer’s money

Late last year, a brand new Virginia startup called Daedalus Aviation Corp. landed a deal with DHS to fly detainees, and they’ve registered four Boeing 737 airplanes. According to data from Virginia State’s Corporation Commission, the company’s formation date was 2024. And its president is William Allen Walters III.

A person with the same name served as the State Department’s deputy chief medical officer for operations during the first Trump administration according to his biography page on LinkedIn, and its chief executive officer at Salus Worldwide Solutions Corp., which last May won a $915 million air services contract with DHS to carry out deportations.

That’s your taxpayer money. And even when people inside these facilities are asking to be self deported, they continue to waste away inside, sometimes for weeks, if not months. Meanwhile, the meter keeps on running and the profits go up.

This system didn’t appear overnight. Its modern blueprint spans back four decades. From there, it is scaled into the infrastructure that we see today. And as you’ve seen, there is a human cost to it all. And most people, they don’t make it out. They get handed off from subcontractor to subcontractor until no one is held responsible and everyone gets paid.

Managing a detention facility requires work: preparing meals for hundreds of people, doing the laundry, sanitation, janitorial work, building maintenance.

But Geo Group, they didn’t perform the work themselves.

It required those detained in their facilities to do the work for them.

Remember the Aurora Processing Center? Geo Group forced nearly everyone detained there to do unpaid janitorial work. And if they didn’t do it? They were threatened with solitary confinement, sometimes for more than 72 hours. People came back from solitary skinny, afraid and antisocial, unable to talk to other people.

In addition to its forced janitorial work, Geo Group fulfilled other job opportunities through a voluntary work program. And although it was voluntary, many had little to no choice to participate. Working for Geo Group was the only way some of these detainees could get enough money to pay for commissary phone calls and other personal belongings. These were not luxuries.

The inadequate meals that Geo Group served left people chronically underfed, unable to get enough food to eat without participating in this voluntary work program.

People argue nonstop about immigration, politics, the border, identity. But beneath it all is something far more universal and far more sinister: a business model that turns human beings into line items.

A per bed billing structure.

A system where suffering generates revenue, especially now that DHS is starting to contract private bounty hunters.

And who runs those bounty hunters? You guessed it. Geo Group.

According to reports from the Intercept, ICE has hired a Geo Group subsidiary called BI Incorporated as part of a new program to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. For Geo Group, that means even bigger profit margins not just to detain immigrants, but now to hunt them as well.

Today, private prison companies like LaSalle management, CoreCivic and Geo Group are posting record earnings and telling their shareholders that there is no end in sight. This doesn’t look like a coincidence. It looks like alignment.

More beds.

More contracts.

More money.

Which brings us to the most infamous symbol of all: Alligator Alcatraz. Here, the corruption is no longer subtle.

Multiple sources tell us that at least two assistant wardens at Alligator Alcatraz are double dipping with taxpayer money. Assistant Wardens Lynn Nicely and Gio Quintana simultaneously hold leadership roles at private prison staffing companies Crimson Solutions LLC and Red Staffing LLC that supply corrections officers to the very prison they oversee. State employees paid for by you.

What happens when impunity becomes policy, when people believe that they can get away with anything, because so far they have?

Today it’s the undocumented immigrant. But tomorrow, tomorrow, the fear is that it will be anyone who the government considers to be un-American. Because as long as human beings remain the product and your tax dollars are up for grabs, this machine will keep on running.

Nearly 20 years ago, the US government made a choice: level the playing field, or bail out the 1%.

I don’t have to tell you who they chose.

This is Corruption Inc: The American way.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.