Geo Group’s net income nearly doubled in the first quarter to $38.3 million. CoreCivic’s profit grew 50 percent to $37.9 million. Their share prices are up 82 percent and 51 percent this year, outpacing the oil companies that got a boost from the war in Iran. The product is human confinement. In 2026, it has been the best investment in America.
Geo Group CEO George Zoley called 2025 “the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history.” New business, in this case, means more bodies in more cells. CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle says he expects even more demand in 2026. The cage merchants are having a banner year.
This is not a law-enforcement policy with a collateral benefit to a contractor. It is a business, and the business is good.
I have watched this movie before. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, and within a decade the Southern states had built a convict-leasing system that re-created the plantation economy under a different name — prisoners, arrested on minor charges, leased to private companies for profit. The incentive was simple: more convictions meant more revenue. The system ran for decades. Immigration detention is civil confinement, not criminal punishment — but the profit architecture is identical: a fee for every occupied bed.
The mechanism has not changed. Geo Group and CoreCivic are paid per bed, per body, per day. The more people the government detains, the more money flows to shareholders. The companies are now reopening shuttered prisons in California, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Jersey, Michigan, and Georgia. CoreCivic added more than 2,500 detainees in the first quarter alone. Geo Group is monitoring another 180,000 people outside detention on ankle bracelets and told investors it has the capacity to monitor “several millions” — a figure that maps neatly onto the estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants in the country. They are not describing a public-safety operation. They are describing a total addressable market.
The pattern is as old as the bail-bond industry and the company store. In the 1980s, the war on drugs filled private prisons with Black and brown bodies and made Corrections Corporation of America — now CoreCivic — a Wall Street darling. The “kids for cash” scandal sent two Pennsylvania judges to prison for taking kickbacks to sentence children to for-profit juvenile facilities. The Obama administration announced a phase-out of private federal prisons in 2016 after a Justice Department inspector general found they were less safe and less secure than public facilities. Trump killed the phase-out; Biden did not restart it. Now the immigration crackdown has given the industry its biggest opening since the drug war.
The administration’s new homeland-security chief, former Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, is reportedly under orders to lower his agency’s profile and avoid bad press before November. That means less public attention, not fewer detainees. The detention population dipped from 60,000 in January to 51,000 in April after the protests and the shootings — a five-year-old and a daycare worker were swept up in raids, and two protesters were shot and killed by federal agents. CoreCivic recently told investors it had experienced a downturn in demand due to “enforcement redeployments and overall strategy adjustments within DHS,” meaning the cameras were on and they had to slow down. But the contracts written last year are still coming online. The infrastructure is being built. The capacity is being expanded. The pipeline is waiting.
The business pages report these numbers alongside share-price comparisons to chipmakers and oil giants, as though human detention were just another sector rotation. The suffering behind those walls is a line item — a temporary dip in same-store sales, corrected by the next contract.
The circle draws itself with the usual precision. A political action committee linked to Representative Jim Jordan — one of the most powerful figures in the House — received $250,000 from an ICE detention contractor this year. Not long before that, the former acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, took a job with a defense contractor. The officials who design the enforcement strategy become the executives who sell the beds. The contributors who fund the campaigns are the same firms that fill the beds. The companies plan at least $253 million in capital spending this year — expanding capacity for a machine that runs on bodies.
Don’t change the subject, dear. The subject is not whether immigration law should be enforced. The subject is whether enforcement should be structured as a profit center for publicly traded corporations whose stock price rises when more human beings are locked in cages. That is a different question. The answer is in the stock chart.
Call it what it is. A publicly traded industry whose revenue scales with the number of human beings in government custody, whose lobbyists fund the officials who write the contracts, whose former regulators walk through the revolving door, and whose CEOs tell shareholders the best is yet to come. The people inside those walls have no shareholders, no lobbyists, and no quarterly earnings call.
The caging company stock tickers are the honest ledger. The bottom line is $38.3 million in a single quarter, and the next quarter will be bigger. Every uptick is a five-year-old in a holding room, a protester shot in the street, a family’s worst day — and the cage merchants are just getting started.