The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts ICE has issued without seeking competitive bids. ICE has cited a "compelling urgency" for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies. To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for "immigration enforcement support teams" to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints, or advising ICE if someone is a risk to community safety. Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract in Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants " and earn $66 million in annual revenue.
The prison-industrial complex is the smaller sibling of the military-industrial complex, where insiders make millions of dollars with no-bid contracts or former federal mandarins are given lucrative positions or sinecures. This is a continuation of the privatization of the for-profit American gulag system that offers little Congressional oversight. This ICE officer below is more heavily armed than I was on some of my military deployments.
