Private prisons and local jails are ramping up as ICE detention exceeds capacity

The federal government is holding more than 48,000 people in immigration detention, about a 20% increase since January.

That is already thousands beyond what Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is funded for, yet the administration has signaled its work is far from over. President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has said he wants to see 100,000 in detention.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently confirmed that the administration doubled the arrest quotas immigration officers must meet – from 1,800 to 3,000 each day. With that demand, the government is intensifying its hunt for more space.

Private prisons are ramping up capacity

Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration’s demand.

Even before Trump returned to office in January, a spokesperson for GEO Group told NPR it was investing $70 million toward housing, monitoring and transporting immigrant detainees.

Since then, the two companies have announced the addition of more than 6,000 beds across the country — in Texas, Ohio, Nevada, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Jersey and Michigan, among others. That includes reopening old prisons and jails, like the Delaney Hall facility owned by GEO Group in Newark, N.J. CoreCivic has indicated that it is preparing many of its idle facilities to be available quickly, though some communities have strongly opposed those plans.

Immigrant rights advocates have raised concerns about conditions at detention centers run by private prison companies.

“A for-profit company, by definition, is trying to make money on this whole process. And that means that if there’s any place where they can save money, they’re going to,” says Laura St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona.

St. John says her clients, many of whom are being held at facilities run by CoreCivic, are seeing deteriorating conditions because of the higher numbers of people being held, including medical neglect and detainees not receiving enough food.

In a statement, CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd refuted those allegations, saying the company follows all ICE standards.

“We have a long-standing, zero-tolerance policy not to advocate for or against any legislation that serves as the basis for — or determines the duration of — an individual’s detention,” Todd said. “Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to.”

Todd added that CoreCivic operates its facilities “with a significant amount of oversight.” However, in March, the Trump administration made sweeping cuts to the watchdog agencies that provided oversight of immigration detention.

GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira also said in a statement that the criticism that private contractors are primarily interested in profit was baseless, and “part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contractors.”

ICE did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.

More local police are working with ICE

Local police departments, usually county sheriffs, are also playing a larger role in immigration detention and enforcement than they have in the past. One avenue is the federal 287g program, which allows local police agencies to partner with ICE.

Depending on the specifics of the police agency’s agreement with ICE, the program allows local officers to process the immigration case of a person currently in jail. Other times, it allows local police to conduct certain aspects of immigration enforcement on the federal government’s behalf while out in the community, essentially multiplying immigration enforcement officers without hiring additional staffers.

More than 600 law enforcement agencies have signed on to the 287g program across 40 states, with dozens more pending, amounting to nearly five times as many as there were at the end of 2024. Florida is requiring all 67 sheriff’s offices in the state to participate, and a bill requiring Texas sheriffs who run jails to do the same is now on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

“It’s nothing short of astonishing,” says Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who studies the program.

A longstanding criticism of the 287g program is that it sours any trust built between law enforcement agencies and the communities that they rely on to do their jobs. Kocher says the program could also have other unintended consequences for local communities.

“It dramatically distorts where we put our law enforcement resources. It confuses actual crimes that need policing and people who are, for the most part, just living here, working here and have a family,” he says. “Law enforcement agencies don’t have unlimited resources and they don’t have unlimited bed space.”

Kocher says more manpower towards immigration means less manpower for keeping communities safe. He says it’s important to remember that people held by ICE are in civil, not criminal, detention. Nearly half of the people currently detained by ICE have no criminal record.

Congress wants to inject a lot more money into detention

ICE Detention is currently funded at $3.4 billion, but lawmakers in Congress have proposed increasing that number by more than tenfold. The GOP megabill, which passed the House in late May, allocates $45 billion for ICE detention. It now heads to the Senate.

But detention is not the end game for the administration; deportation is.

“It’s often repeated that, yes, they want to detain as many people as possible,” says Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “Actually what they want is to be detaining people for as little time as possible and detaining the lowest number of people necessary to conduct these mass deportations.”

She says as the administration rushes to achieve its deportation goals, many people will continue to get swept up in the system – not only people living in the country without legal status, but also immigrants here on a visa or a green card, and even U.S. Citizens.

“We have to make the connection between increased enforcement and the infringement of everybody’s rights,” she says.