Late Wednesday afternoon, the private prison company CoreCivic announced that they would be reopening a notorious family detention center in South Texas, under an amended contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Texas facility, first built in 2014, will house up to 2,400 people—including children. It was shut down in June 2024 to save costs, after years of reports suggesting poor treatment, including a report of one toddler who died due to a lack of medical care.
The reopening is part of a trend. CoreCivic isn’t the only company bringing back facilities. We are at the beginning of what looks like a private prison boom, as the groups profit off of Trump’s plans for mass deportation. They are set to make billions. As the Washington Post reported, GEO Group and CoreCivic stand to benefit in particular from President Donald Trump’s immigration plans—the companies hold at least 16 vacant facilities that can be reopened within months for mass detention and deportation.
GEO Group, another private prison giant, announced in late February that it would be reopening Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, as a “massive” immigration detention center, and dramatically increasing its capacity by 1,000 beds. In California, ICE is considering repurposing and reopening the women’s prison FCI Dublin, closed in April 2024 due to mass sexual abuse, for immigrant detention. In Baldwin, Michigan, ICE and GEO Group have expressed interest in reopening North Lake Correctional Facility, a former private prison shuttered in 2022. (A Biden Administration order directed the Department of Justice to allow contracts with private prison groups to expire.) In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic looks likely to partner with ICE to reopen yet another shuttered private prison, an ACLU FOIA revealed.
As of February 23rd, ICE held 43,759 detainees, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data-gathering organization. Trump is putting pressure on ICE to increase the number of arrests per day. His administration has already fired one ICE director, ostensibly for not deporting enough people.
In the communities surrounding these new jails for migrants, activists and politicians are fighting back. In Newark—where GEO Group stands to make $1.2 billion by reopening Delaney Hall—the immigrant-rights organization Make The Road is planning a rally against the jail on March 11th.
“The reopening of Delaney Hall will mean heightened ICE presence and arrests in New Jersey,” said Eliana Fernandez, Make The Road’s organizing director. In 2017, when the detention center was last operational, its private management came under fire for physical and sexual abuse of detainees. To Fernandez, this is a cash grab by GEO Group, benefiting from the suffering of immigrants. “There’s a private interest behind the detention and the incarceration of our community…but we have been through this road before, and we have made it to the other side.”
It’s also not clear whether the reopening of places like Delaney Hall would be entirely legal. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law banning private detention facilities. CoreCivic, the company planning to operate Delaney Hall, sued and won the right to operate. Still, on the city level, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka threatened to issue a stop-work order on Delaney Hall.
“The reality is, they have to go through the permitting process,” Baraka said in early March. “They don’t go through that, then the building can’t be opened. We’re going to go over there in the next couple of days and probably do a stop-work order to shut the building down until they finish getting permits.”
