Making a Killing - Issue No. 1
A Weekly Roundup of Private Immigration Detention News
Welcome to Wednesday.
Today I’m trying a first installment of Making a Killing, which I envision might become a regular weekly digest of news stories about the business and impacts of for-profit immigration detention that’s piled up in my inbox over the last week.
It’s inspired in part by publications like Seamus Hughes’ CourtWatch.News, which offers a punchy federal docket roundup and Dan Kowalski’s Involuntary Departure, which does something similar with immigration legal decisions.
I’ll share information and connections between stories about the major publicly traded and privately held ICE detention contractors, as well as any publishable news you send me that might help add perspectives of people inside their for-profit migrant prisons.
So, without further introduction, here’s the last week or so of
Migrant Prison Profiteer News Roundup
Market Indicators
There’s this misconception that the push to round up and detain as many people for deportation as possible has led to boom times for the private prison industry. But based on share price alone, we actually see 4% losses this year for GEO, and a relatively modest 1.7% gain YTD for CoreCivic.
Source: Portfolios Lab
This puts both of these securities below the performance of the market, which is roughly how it shook out under the first Trump administration, too.
For comparison, the NYSE Composite Index is up 3.84%, the NASDAQ is up 2.47%, and the S&P 500 is up 2.05% YTD.
Takeaway: If you’d put your money in a shoebox at the beginning of the year, it’d be worth more than if you’d invested it in $GEO. And if you’d just put your money in a fund pegged to the market, you’d have more than if you’d invested in $CXW.
Death Toll
Source: ICE Deaths Tracker - On File with Author
CoreCivic continues to lead the market in deaths in ICE custody, with GEO and Akima (Krome’s operator), coming up tied for second place during Fiscal Year 2025.
GEO Group in the News
On the Dole - Border Czar Tom Homan was on GEO’s consultant payroll, according to a WaPo story released Tuesday. Sen. Durbin apparently says the corruption’s too big to ignore, as quoted in LatinTimes. The work likely happened while Durbin had the gavel and Ds voted to increase ICE detention funding. More on the revolving door between ICE and prison contractors in the Dockets section below.
Grand Closing, Grand Opening - The New Mexico Corrections Department is “closing” GEO-operated Lea County detention facility at the end of June after 27 years. This will result in opening up space for GEO to land another ICE contract - potentially making it the fourth dedicated ICE prison in the state, and GEO’s first.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports GEO unsuccessfully tried to sell the facility to Lea County after deciding not to renew its operating contract. Corrections1 says there will be “more than 200 layoffs,” apparently unaware that this is always what GEO says before it converts the contract. Following Innovation Law Lab for action on the ground.
Going Public - Oklahoma is set to buy the Lawton Correctional Facility from GEO in a move that some hope will reduce violence by removing the profit motive from the prison’s operation. GEO staff will be offered state DOC employment IF they can pass a background check, making good on a pledge of no job cuts. I wonder what that process will uncover.
HSI Charges Now-Former GEO Guard with Choking Detained Migrant - On March 21, GEO’s Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Texas was the site of Charles Siringi’s alleged choking of a handcuffed migrant before slamming him into the wall and dragging him across the room, HSI alleges in federal civil rights charges. Siringi is out on a $10k bond. This would mark the first indictment of a private prison guard I can recall in years for abuse against an ICE-detained migrant, despite credible evidence that this sort of thing happens quite frequently and nearly always goes unpunished.
DOJ Charges Congresswoman with Doing Her Job Assaulting Federal Officers - After dropping baseless “trespassing” charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, the DOJ indicted U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver for assault, impeding, and interfering with law enforcement” while visiting GEO’s newly reopened Delaney Hall facility as an ICE prison. McIver pleaded not guilty.
From Denmark to Mississippi to Jena - 42 year-old Danish father Kasper Eriksen is now reportedly in the same facility ICE is detaining Mahmoud Khalil - Jena - after his surprise arrest at a citizenship interview in Memphis. He’s doing his best to ingratiate himself to his captors, saying the “food is palatable, the staff is professional, and the medical care is attentive.”
No Contact » Contact - Around the time Eriksen arrived, a federal immigration judge deferred to GEO officials at Jena in refusing to facilitate a contact visit between Mahmoud and his newborn son. An actual federal judge overruled the company and ICE and ordered them to allow a contact visit.
Labor Unions Rally Outside NWDC in Tacoma - A broad coalition of labor unions and Filipino community groups that included the SEIU and the IAM joined La Resistencia outside GEO’s allegedly toxic wage theft factory on the Tideflats May 23 to express solidarity with people inside.
CoreCivic in the News
Not Giving Up - Fresh off a loss in federal court, the City of Leavenworth has once again sued CoreCivic , this time in state court, to halt the company’s plans to open an ICE detention facility on the site a federal judge once called a “hellhole.”
Residents and former guards in Leavenworth don’t want the facility to open. A Cold Blood-ed analysis by a local Kansas writer documents how Kansas ICE collaborators are denying the state’s open records act when he tries to get information about the other facilities there.
One former guard, William Rogers, was moved to public oppose CoreCivic’s reopening of Leavenworth as an ICE jail in part by his experience “holding an inmate as the man died,” reports the Kansas Reflector.
Wal[t]zing in like they own the place - Minnesota lawmakers have written to Gov. Tim Walz saying they want to reopen CoreCivic-owned 1600-bed Prairie Correctional Facility, which has’t held folks since 2010. Lawmakers like this guy:
Their main justification for reopening this long-dormant CoreCivic property? Another prison in the state is closing. Keep an eye on this one.
Cashing In (Again) - CoreCivic’s CEO, Damon Hininger, sold 72,246 shares of the company’s stock for around $1.5M (at around $22/share). Its Dickensanly named President and COO, Patrick Swindle, sold 23,000 shares, for around half a million dollars (assuming ~$22/share). Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer Anthony Grande also sold 10,000 shares in May at $22.22.
This adds to the post-election sell-off CoreCivic’s core leadership team, which saw around $5 million of insider stock sales between election day 2024 and January 2025:
The board also approved a $150M share buyback program that should bump up the price even higher and allow these executives to cash in even more.
“Normalization” - Bent County Correctional Facility in Las Animas, Colorado looks like this, CoreCivic tells investors. Why don’t the rest of its facilities?
Ungagged - The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee recently abandoned its rules allowing attorney gag orders after attorney and certified CoreCivic Opp Daniel Horwitz and his counsel appealed their First Amendment suit to the Sixth Circuit.
Resignation - A Dalton, GA cop who allegedly wrongfully arrested a 19 year-old college student ICE sent to CoreCivic’s the Stewart Detention Center resigned, shortly after she was released on the statutory minimum $1,500 bond. The now-former officer’s wife reportedly posted on facebook that he quit because the department failed to defend him against false allegations and dropped the charges despite a valid arrest.
Ximena Arias-Cristobal said “I will never be the same” after her detention at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center.
"Being in Stewart changed my life. It's something that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It's life-changing,"
Dockets
Recently filed cases by, against or otherwise implicating these companies that make a killing reproducing the carceral economies of bordering and mass incarceration are a vital source of early information about what’s not in the 10-Ks. Yet.
CoreCivic v. Universal Strategic Advisors, LLC (M.D. Tenn.)
“Fundamentally,” CoreCivic’s lawyers claimed in a lawsuit removed to federal court from Tennessee chancery court earlier this month, “this is a case of betrayal.” CoreCivic noticed ICE was putting more immigrants on non-detained docket case management systems, and decided in 2020 to try and get in on the action. Extending its profit opportunities to people not locked inside the company’s facilities would take know-how, though. So the company hired the guy who used to run non-detained case management programs for ICE — Timothy Robbins. Robbins was a former ICE Deputy Assistant Director with Enforcement and Removal Operations, and then an Acting Executive Associate Director. When Robbins left the agency, he founded Universal Strategic Advisors, LLC (US Advisors). CoreCivic hired his firm on November 1, 2020, and paid US Advisors $30k per month, for a total of $1.5 million, until March 2025. The point of the engagement was to help CoreCivic craft a proposal to scoop up some of the non-detained docket case management business from ICE.
Except that’s not what happened. CoreCivic submitted proposals in 2023, August 2024, and January 2025 with Robbins’ help. But on February 9, 2025, the company says, “[o]ut of the blue, on Sunday, February 9, 2025, CoreCivic received a letter from US Advisors terminating the Agreement on thirty-days’ notice,” making the termination effective March 11, 2025. CoreCivic then learned during the week of March 10 “much to its shock and dismay”, that US Advisors and Robbins “while still under contract with and being paid by CoreCivic—had submitted a proposal of their own to ICE for the same case management services as those proposed by CoreCivic.” Wow.
On March 13, 2025, the Complaint alleges, “US Advisors’ proposal was accepted, and it received at $73 million contract award from ICE.” Double wow.
For these transgressions, CoreCivic is suing US Advisors and its principals for half a billion dollars in breach of contract and tortious interference damages.
On May 12, 2025, USA moved to dismiss CoreCivic’s complaint. The memorandum of law and exhibits accompanying the motion claim CoreCivic didn’t hire Robbins’ company to do non-detained docket management business proposals, but rather, to help CoreCivic get “detention services” contracts from ICE. USA also claims CoreCivic was ineligible for the contract it received, because CoreCivic doesn’t have an existing contract with the General Services Administration account that was required. And, USA says, after a bid protest to the GAO resulted in the April 9 suspension of the $73M award to Robbins’ firm, the government terminated the entire contract “for convenience” later in April. So, USA tells the court, CoreCivic has no damages because it could never have obtained the contract ICE awarded Robbins’ firm.
Judge Crenshaw granted CoreCivic an extension of time to respond to the motion to dismiss. We’ll keep an eye on this case.
GEO v. Menocal at SCOTUS
GEO’s petition for certiorari in the Menocal forced labor/unjust enrichment case out of the facility’s Aurora detention center is now fully briefed and has been relisted. The justices are set to confer about it a second time on May 29.
The narrow issue before the court is whether, as the Tenth Circuit held, a district court’s denial of Yearsley immunity (sometimes misnamed “derivative sovereign immunity”) is an immediately appealable collateral order than can go straight to the court of appeals.
According to SCOTUSBlog, a “relisted” petition can mean a lot of things:
Question: What does it mean to relist a case?
Answer: When a case is relisted, the justices do not grant or deny review, but instead will reconsider the case at their next conference. This will be reflected on the case’s electronic docket once the docket has been updated: You will see the words “DISTRIBUTED for Conference of [fill in date],” and then the next entry in the docket will usually say “DISTRIBUTED for Conference of [next conference after the previous entry, whenever that is].” It is almost impossible to know exactly what is happening when a particular case is relisted, but there are a few possibilities. One justice could be trying to pick up a fourth vote to grant review, one or more justices may want to look more closely at the case, a justice could be writing an opinion about the court’s decision to deny review, or the court could be writing an opinion to summarily reverse (that is, rule in favor of the petitioning party without briefing or oral argument on the merits) the decision below. In 2014, the court appears to have adopted a general practice of granting review only after it has relisted a case at least once; although we don’t know for sure, presumably the court uses the extra time resulting from a relist to make sure that the case is a suitable one for its review.
Two amici have weighed in saying how important it is for government contractors to be able to avoid trials and go straight to appellate review. One stubborn question, though: Once the appellant gets there, how will fact disputes be resolved? Isn’t that what trials are for?
We’ll see what the Court does.
Disclosure: I was formerly class co-counsel in this case.