U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has awarded a private prison company a 15-year contract worth $1 billion to detain up to 1,000 immigrants in New Jersey, the first expansion of an immigrant detention center amid the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations, News From The States reports. "This detention center is the first to open under the new administration," said ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello. "The location near an international airport streamlines logistics, and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities.” On a Thursday earnings call, executives for one of the largest private prisons, GEO Group Inc., told investors they expect “unprecedented opportunities” under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown by providing detention bed capacity and increasing electronic monitoring services of immigrants. The Newark detention center, Delaney Hall, will be the largest ICE processing facility and detention center on the East Coast, said George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman of GEO. GEO has pushed for a contract with ICE to reopen that facility as a detention center and sued New Jersey over its state law that bars private and public companies from contracting with ICE to detain immigrants.
Zoley said that GEO plans to increase its bed space capacity from 15,000 to 32,000. He said those additional 17,000 beds “could generate between $500 million and $600 million in incremental, annualized revenues.” He added that the company is expected to activate all of its idle facilities across the country by the end of the year to meet Trump’s mission of mass deportation of people in the U.S. without legal authorization. An idle facility means it’s currently unused, but it can be up and running within 60 to 90 days, Zoley said. Zoley said for the year, the company expects to invest roughly $38 million to renovate existing GEO facilities. He added that the company also plans to invest $16 million for additional GPS tracking devices for immigrants on the non-detained docket. A non-detained docket is an alternative to detention and allows an immigrant to be electronically monitored while awaiting court proceedings. The main ICE program that is an alternative to detention is known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP. There are about 184,000 people under ISAP, but Zoley told investors that the number of people in that program could easily double under the Trump administration’s focus on immigration enforcement within the country. He said returning to levels of more than 300,000 people monitored under ISAP could bring in a revenue of around $250 million.
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