In deep red Hanover County, Virginia, just north of Richmond, Donald Trump won 62 percent of the vote in 2024. It might have followed that the voters there supported his administration’s immigration agenda. And yet, in January, Hanover County’s board of supervisors opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to purchase and retrofit a local 550,000-square-foot warehouse as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Protest was so vociferous that the Vancouver-based developer Jim Pattison Developments announced the sale would “not be proceeding.”
In the early months of the new Trump administration, D.H.S. spent some $1 billion on 11 warehouses, promising to turn those inhospitable spaces into 100,000 beds for immigrants on track to deportation. But, as in Hanover County, officials and communities across the country pushed back against warehouse expansion plans, citing humanitarian concerns, pressures on local infrastructure and services, and general revulsion at the notion of hosting detention centers in their hometowns. The agency is now planning to sell or offload seven of the 11 warehouses bought in that early spending spree.
But one solution created another problem: D.H.S. will now most likely increase its existing reliance on private for-profit firms to maintain or boost immigration detention capacity. That pivot comes with its own set of humanitarian worries, raises even greater transparency and oversight concerns and makes it harder for communities to resist the effort. At the start of Trump’s second term, the government was detaining around 40,000 immigrants. Today, there are more than 65,000 detainees housed across the country in for-profit and government-owned detention centers and county jails.
Whether privately run or operated by the government, immigration detention facilities have historically had a notoriously poor track record. Reports abound of detainees being placed in overcrowded and unsanitary facilities, deprived of medical care and served contaminated food. Thirty-three people died in ICE custody last year, the highest number in two decades. ICE has already recorded 20 deaths in detention so far this year.
Several of ICE’s newly purchased warehouse conversion projects were thwarted or delayed because of lawsuits arguing that the agency didn’t conduct the required environmental reviews. That worked for new spaces. Now, as ICE is working with both county jails and for-profit firms to expand detention capacity by drawing on empty beds in operating facilities, or reopening facilities that already existed, it will be harder for state and local governments to credibly argue that a town’s infrastructure can’t handle the influx of people.
Further, for-profit firms are generally not required to directly comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That means that when a family member or journalist is looking for information about a detainee, alive or dead, legal hurdles can stand in the way. FOIA applies specifically to federal government agencies. When it comes to information or communications that remain proprietary to a private company, the public cannot compel private prison corporations to provide those materials.
When journalists and others do receive documents through the federal government’s FOIA mechanism, the materials are often significantly redacted. It is already challenging for family members or private counsel to track down and even confirm the presence of a detainee, let alone his or her status, in this immigration detention system.
For-profit prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic — as well as local counties — have long contracted with the federal government to build and operate detention centers and transport detainees from one location to another. ICE is a significant source of revenue for these two companies: GEO Group reported that ICE made up 48 percent of its revenue for 2025; CoreCivic reported that ICE accounted for 35 percent of its total revenue that same year.
In February 2025, the federal government awarded a 15-year contract to GEO Group to house ICE detainees at its 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey. Administration officials also contracted with CoreCivic to reopen a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, that can hold 2,400 people. In March of this year, CoreCivic began receiving detainees at its newly opened Midwest Regional Reception Center in Leavenworth, Kan., which has the capacity to hold 1,033 people. Detainees at both the family detention facility in Texas and the facility in New Jersey have reported inhumane conditions and contaminated food. Both groups have disputed these claims, and have said that detainees have access to medical care and meals that adhere to religious diets, among other amenities.
“CoreCivic is committed to partnering with the federal government to help meet their goals and objectives,” CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs, Ryan Gustin, wrote to me last month by email in response to questions about the federal government’s warehouse strategy and his perspective on the company’s ability to increase bed capacity to help meet the government’s demand. He noted that CoreCivic was not involved in the warehouse purchases and that the company has worked with the federal government for more than four decades. “We routinely engage with all our government partners on ways to deliver value to the taxpayer, and we welcome those conversations,” he said. GEO Group referred me to ICE for my questions.
There are some ways for a concerned public to address transparency and oversight issues. In 2017, the California legislature passed a law requiring the state’s Department of Justice to review and report on conditions of confinement at civil immigration detention facilities across the state. Other states should take California’s lead. This month, D.H.S. bought two California detention centers from CoreCivic for a combined $1.5 billion. CoreCivic will continue to manage the facilities, but now that the federal government owns the detention centers there could be legal challenges about state oversight.
At the national level, Congress should drastically expand the information that private prison companies must disclose, giving the public much better insight into the state of these facilities and the contracts behind them. The idea already exists in the Private Prison Information Act, a piece of legislation that has been introduced multiple times over the past two decades without success. The bill would require private prison companies to be subject to the same transparency requirements as the federal government when those companies are contracting with the federal government to hold federal prisoners or detainees.
Selling many of the recently purchased warehouses won’t dismantle the administration’s immigration detention agenda. And increasing reliance on for-profit firms comes with the dark possibility that we will know even less about what is happening to immigrants. But opening immigration detention practices to scrutiny is one of the most important ways to ensure that vulnerable people are being treated humanely.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen is the senior director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. Law. She’s also the author of “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
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