David Venturella spent 22 years in federal immigration enforcement, the last several at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, before leaving in 2012 for GEO Group. He spent a decade there as Senior Vice President for Client Relations, the company’s term for the government agencies that pay it. He retired in 2022, consulted for GEO two years longer, then returned to ICE as a senior adviser. In June 2026, he was appointed acting director of ICE. The same person has now sat on both sides of the same negotiating table, for the same industry, twice, without ever leaving it. “It’s really hard to see where the interests of ICE end and those of private prison companies begin,” Setareh Ghandehari of Detention Watch Network said the day it happened. That isn’t a metaphor. It’s a résumé.
What a bed is worth
In August 2026, CoreCivic’s CEO, Patrick Swindle, told investors the company had completed the sale of four detention facilities to the Department of Homeland Security for $1.6 billion in net proceeds: an average of $307,000 per bed. Two of the four were named specifically: California City Correctional Facility and Otay Mesa Detention Center, both in California. CoreCivic keeps operating all four. It just doesn’t own the buildings anymore; the federal government does. The company converted real estate into cash and kept the contracts.
That’s the plainest way to see what this industry actually sells. Not incarceration, not enforcement: occupancy. The number both GEO Group and CoreCivic report to investors every quarter, the one that moves their stock, is how full their facilities are. In 2025, GEO Group’s profit was $254 million, a nearly 700 percent increase over the year before. CoreCivic’s 2025 profit rose 70 percent, to $116.5 million. Neither number came from a new market or a new invention. It came from more beds staying full.
The pivot, in the company’s own words
Both companies’ growth over the past decade traces to one underlying fact: state prison populations have been falling, and immigration detention has been the only part of the system still growing. California’s state prison population fell by roughly 22 percent in the four years leading up to 2022, driven largely by sentencing reforms, Propositions 47 and 57, that voters passed directly. The state ended its lease with CoreCivic at California City in March 2024, citing the cost. Within about a year, the same building was back under CoreCivic contract, this time to detain people for ICE, before the federal government bought the property outright in 2026.
Both companies say this plainly when they’re talking to investors rather than the public. As early as June 2015, GEO Group’s own vice president, Shayn March, told a bond conference the company would grow through “elderly care, immigrant detention, and expansion plans overseas.” It was a diversification pitch delivered the same year GEO’s own SEC filings listed criminal justice reform as a risk to the company’s revenue. By 2023, GEO’s filings described a new ICE contract in explicit accounting terms: it would help “offset” revenue the company was losing as its federal criminal-custody contracts wound down. In August 2026, CEO George Zoley told investors the $520 million in new business GEO won in 2025 alone was “the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company’s history,” driven by what he called “unprecedented growth opportunities” as the government pursues “the priority of increasing immigration detention capacity to 100,000 beds or more.” CoreCivic’s then-CEO, Damon Hininger, put it more plainly in an August 2025 earnings call: “Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment.”
Nationally, the pattern is exact. Per the Prison Policy Initiative’s full 2026 accounting of the country’s incarcerated population, ICE detention, roughly 69,000 people as of January 2026, was virtually the only segment still growing, up 58 percent in a single year, even as state prisons, federal prisons, and local jails combined held roughly steady. It’s a small fraction of the nearly 2 million people confined in the U.S. at any given time. It’s also the only number moving.
Two facilities carry the pattern in miniature. GEO’s North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, held federal criminal defendants until 2022, sat empty, then reopened in 2025 as “North Lake Processing Center”: now the largest ICE detention facility in the Midwest, under a roughly $70 million contract. GEO’s Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, North Carolina, held federal prisoners for the Bureau of Prisons from 2001 until a 2021 executive order ended the contract; internal ICE documents reviewed by the Marshall Project in August 2026 describe plans to reopen it as one of the largest immigration jails on the East Coast, matching a contract already on the books worth roughly $457 million. Same buildings. Same operators. A different line on the same company’s income statement.
The layer underneath
Detention is the visible spending. Underneath it is a newer, smaller contract layer that makes the enforcement possible in the first place. In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir Technologies $30 million to build a system called ImmigrationOS: enforcement-prioritization software drawing on passport records, Social Security data, IRS filings, and license-plate-reader databases. A second task order months later brought the deal’s ceiling to $157.5 million. Palantir has supplied ICE’s case-management systems since 2013; the company has taken in more than $900 million in federal contracts since the current administration began, and its stock doubled in 2025.
Clearview AI, the facial-recognition company built on billions of photos scraped from the public internet without the people in them ever being asked, is a real-world version of what this site’s lexicon calls the surveillance dividend: profit pulled from people who were never customers and never consented. It signed a $9.2 million ICE contract in September 2025, its latest since a 2020 pilot and a 2021 agency-wide license, this one designated for child-exploitation and assaults-on-officers investigations specifically. A separate, older contract with LexisNexis Risk Solutions gives roughly 11,000 ICE personnel real-time access to a database of more than 82 billion records: jail bookings, device locations, image matches. A 2026 renewal explicitly built the system to feed that data directly into Palantir’s platform through a shared interface. A fourth company, Anduril, holds a $363 million contract for AI-enabled surveillance towers along the southern border; that one sits with Customs and Border Protection specifically, a separate DHS agency from ICE, but the same industry, the same donor class, the same administration.
The revolving door, and what money doesn’t hide
Venturella isn’t the only name. Daniel Bible ran ICE’s detention operations nationally before becoming a GEO Group executive vice president in 2024. Julie Wood led ICE under George W. Bush and now sits on GEO’s board. Daniel Ragsdale, a former ICE deputy director, joined GEO’s executive ranks in 2017; Matthew Albence, who led the agency during the first Trump term, joined in 2022. Todd Lyons, who ran ICE as acting director through most of 2025 while it carried out a reported quota of roughly 3,000 arrests a day, left the agency in 2026 for a security consulting firm whose client list includes GEO Group. And before she became Attorney General, Pam Bondi spent 2019 as a registered lobbyist for GEO Group, working the White House and the Department of Homeland Security on the company’s behalf.
The money runs the same direction, and unlike the trusts and donor-advised funds elsewhere in this series, almost none of it is hidden. GEO Group and CoreCivic each gave $500,000 to the 2025 presidential inaugural committee: a matter of public record, not a leak. GEO’s political action committee gave $1 million to the pro-administration super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2024. GEO’s own 2025 disclosure puts its total lobbying spending, federal and state combined, at $5.37 million. Since the inauguration, GEO’s ICE contracts alone have grown past $1 billion; CoreCivic’s past $544 million. OpenSecrets, which tracks all of it, is careful about what that proves rather than what it merely suggests: political scientist Frank Baumgartner, quoted in its reporting, describes “huge contracts… awarded with relatively little oversight”; sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza calls it an “immigration industrial complex” in which, in her words, “these companies would be in economic and fiscal trouble” without continued mass deportation. Worth stating plainly: other companies, such as Gardaworld Federal Services, KVG, and KBP Services, hold ICE contracts just as large, with no comparable donation history at all. The money isn’t the only way into this business. It’s just the way GEO and CoreCivic chose.
One more relationship belongs in this section precisely because it doesn’t prove what it looks like it proves. Tom Homan, the administration’s border policy lead, did paid consulting work for a GEO Group division in the weeks before the current term began, for a reported fee of just over $5,000. Months later, GEO won a $47 million contract expanding a Georgia facility into the country’s largest. No reporting has established a direct link between the two, and this piece won’t manufacture one that isn’t there. The honest version is narrower, and in its way more telling: in this industry, an overlap like that is common enough not to register as unusual.
Institutional capture is the term for what the first half of this section describes: an industry that doesn’t lobby its regulator from outside but becomes it, the same handful of names moving through the same revolving door in either direction. Harm sanitization is the softer vocabulary built to make that comfortable to read about: “client relations,” “processing center,” “occupancy.” These are clean words built for an earnings call, standing in for a bed and the person in it.
Who’s actually holding the stock
One more question is worth asking directly, because the honest answer cuts against the easy assumption: does the Trump Organization, Trump’s own hotel-and-licensing business, distinct from his administration and his donors, have any financial stake in any of this? No evidence of one exists. The watchdog groups that have investigated this exact question, CREW and POGO among them, don’t allege one either.
What they found instead is more specific, and it isn’t the Trump Organization at all. Trump’s personal investments sit in a revocable trust, not a blind one, with Donald Trump Jr. as trustee, managed day-to-day by outside brokerages at JPMorgan, Schwab, and UBS. Every president from Carter through Biden avoided this exact question a different way: either a blind trust, or holdings simple enough that the question never came up. Biden’s own disclosures, for one, showed no individual stock holdings at all. Trump used neither. His own 2026 ethics filing discloses, by name and by date, dozens of trades in the companies this piece is about: GEO Group and CoreCivic in positions running from four to five figures, and Palantir, his largest position of the three by far, in trades reaching six and seven figures across 2025 alone. The first GEO Group purchase came ten days after the inauguration. Trump’s own defense, given to reporters directly: “I purposely never speak to any of the people that run the money.” The White House’s, given to CNBC: “There are no conflicts of interest.”
One more name from this piece turns up again here, in a different role. Donald Trump Jr.’s own venture fund, 1789 Capital, holds a stake in Anduril: the fourth company in this piece’s surveillance layer. Anduril’s most recent funding round, $4 billion in early 2026, was co-led by Thrive Capital, run by Joshua Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother. Jared Kushner divested from Thrive years ago specifically to avoid conflicts like this one; his brother’s firm and Trump’s own son’s firm both stayed in. The arrangement is now the subject of a House Judiciary Committee inquiry led by Rep. Jamie Raskin.
It isn’t the first time this exact intersection has shown up around a hotel bill. In 2018, while lobbying ICE for a contract expansion, GEO’s David Venturella, the same Venturella this piece opened with, charged at least ten stays at Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel to his company card, a pattern serious enough that two U.S. senators wrote GEO’s board to ask about it.
Who’s actually collecting in Ohio
Here is where the obvious story is the wrong one. Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community, the one that became a national political flashpoint in 2024, has a real, current, documented connection to detention. At least 29 of its residents had been detained by late August 2026, after Temporary Protected Status for Haitians expired on July 27. Most are held at the Butler County Jail in Hamilton, Ohio.
It would be easy to assume GEO Group or CoreCivic is the beneficiary. Neither is. Butler County Jail is a public facility, run by an elected sheriff, Richard Jones. ICE pays the county directly: $105 a day per person held, raised from $68 in November 2025. The money goes into the county’s own general fund: roughly $200 million collected over 20 years, on pace for $22 million in 2026 alone. There is no GEO or CoreCivic facility anywhere in Butler County. The nearest CoreCivic-run prison in Ohio is in Youngstown, a different county entirely, and the one historical link between that facility and Haitian detention, a 2016 proposal to house migrants there, involved a different group of people crossing the southern border, a decade before Springfield became a political story. The two events share a nationality and a state. They don’t share a company, a contract, or a decade.
That’s not a small correction. It means the money in this specific, most politically charged case isn’t flowing to a distant investor at all. It’s flowing to the county government of the community itself, which doesn’t make the incentive more comfortable. It makes it more local, and more direct, than the national picture suggests.
The same machine, a new tenant
This site has already documented what happens to the roughly 2 million people confined in the United States on any given day: the forfeiture, the fines, the labor extracted at pennies an hour, the surveillance that outlasts the sentence. Immigration detention isn’t a separate system bolted onto that machine. It’s the same machine, often the same two companies, sometimes the same physical buildings, now billing a different customer as the domestic side of the business shrinks. CoreCivic’s own CEO said as much to shareholders without being asked to, in August 2026: ICE, in his words, “has been our largest customer for over a decade.”
None of this required a donor-advised fund or an anonymous nine-figure gift, the way the rest of this series has. It required a revolving door nobody bothered to hide, contracts posted in public procurement databases, a financial disclosure form filed on schedule, and a bed count that rises exactly as fast as a stock price. The return on investment here isn’t a redrawn map, or a favorable ruling years later. It’s a wire transfer, on a schedule, for as long as the beds stay full.
