"ICE Internment Camps, Inc."
I listened to recordings of private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic's earnings calls. What they told their investors is coming next is one of the most chilling things I've ever heard.
“These people talk about locking human beings in modern concentration camps the way a hotel chain talks about thread counts.”
At an ICE internment camp in Tacoma run by GEO Group, a guard ruthlessly beat a man named Jeffersonking Anyanwu - a Nigerian student who came to the U.S. to study computer science - for asking to use a computer to file his own immigration appeal. Beat him repeatedly in the testicles. Refused to let medical staff treat him. Then filed a disciplinary report charging Anyanwu with causing the incident.
It was on video. The charges against Anyanwu were thrown out - because a camera caught the guard doing it.
Just over a week later, GEO Group’s chairman George Zoley told investors on their earnings call that 2025 was “the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history.” $520 million in new contracts. 24,000 people in custody. The “highest level of ICE populations we’ve ever had.”
He did not mention Jeffersonking Anyanwu. He did not mention the ever-increasing number of people who have died in ICE custody this year. What he talked about - for one horrific, callous hour of congratulations and investor backslapping and raw excitement - was how much bigger this is all about to get, and how great that’s going to be for their bottom line.
GEO Group and CoreCivic are the private prison corporations that run most of America’s private ICE internment camps, accounting for 57% of ICE’s captives.
I listened to both companies’ earnings calls and pored over the full transcripts - not the press releases, not the Wall Street analyst summaries, but the actual words these executives and their investors used to describe the business of locking human beings in cages for profit.
Nobody gets detained on these calls - not in the language, anyway. Human beings become numbers and overcrowding becomes “population size records.” A facility filling with human beings is just the “census increasing,” and beds aren’t where people sleep - they’re units of revenue capacity, priced by the day and measured by their profits.
On CoreCivic’s call, CEO Patrick Swindle read the number out like he was reading a quarterly weather report: “an average daily population across all managed facilities of 56,038 individuals.”
Fifty-six thousand human beings. ICE has so thoroughly normalized mass internment - the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the Japanese internments of 1941, one of the darkest chapters of American history - that a CEO can describe caging 56,000 people and the only question from the room is whether the profit margins would hit 22% or 24%.
And the investors on the other end of these calls? They aren’t pushing back. They’re pushing for more.
An investor from Imperial Capital asked Zoley about the warehouse camp contracts:
“Those are pretty attractive contracts, aren’t they? I mean, in terms of ROI [return on investment], operating those facilities could be a pretty good business, right?”
That’s a Wall Street investment analyst asking whether converting a warehouse into a 9,000-person internment camp will earn profits for his firm.
The same investor, on the CoreCivic call, asked Patrick Swindle:
“Do you see anything on the horizon that would allow detentions to step up?”
- meaning, what might cause more people to be locked up, because that’s what drives the stock price.
Not a single analyst on either call asked about conditions inside the camps, or the people dying in custody, or the lawsuits. The only questions were how fast you can fill the beds and how much money it will make.
An analyst asked Zoley about the government’s plan to buy commercial warehouses across the country and retrofit them into ICE internment camps.
Zoley explained that ICE is running a “dual track” - filling existing private prison beds and scouting warehouse locations. But finding locations is complicated:
“It’s very complicated to find locations in areas that are suitable to their needs and would meet with the less political resistance. You know, you got red states versus blue states issues that you got to solve through.”
He said that on a recorded call, to investors. And later, he went further:
“We’re looking at some sites predominantly in the Sun Belt states, predominantly in red states, to be very frank about it.”
So let me be equally frank.
The chairman of the largest private detention company in America just explained that the strategy for building new ICE internment camps is to put them where people won’t fight back.
Red states. Sun Belt. Communities where they believe the political cost of warehousing human beings is low enough that shareholders don’t have to worry about it.
A warehouse sale in Kansas City was halted days before this call after people showed up and refused to let it happen. So now the industry is doing what it always does - finding the path of least resistance, finding the communities that don’t have the political infrastructure to say no, choosing who gets a camp in their backyard based on who’s least likely to stop it.
The scale they’re planning keeps me up at night, and I don’t tend towards pessimism or alarmism. This exchange between Zoley and an analyst from Imperial Capital was particularly telling:
ZOLEY: “..500-bed facilities, 1,500-bed facilities, and facilities of several thousands of beds - seven, eight, or 9,000 beds per facility… Those are larger numbers than any in existence. I think the largest facility is probably 2,500 beds, not more than 3,000 beds in the country.”
INVESTOR: “Wow. Interesting.”
They are planning camps three times the size of the largest one in the country - converted warehouses, in communities selected for their political compliance, operated by a company with almost no experience doing any of this.
Zoley admitted as much on the call:
“We’ve only had one experience in renovating a warehouse, and that occurred maybe 30 years ago... it was like a 200-bed facility.”
He said it’s “more complicated than you may think,” and that was for two hundred beds, three decades ago. Now GEO is evaluating bids to convert warehouses into camps holding 9,000 people - forty-five times the size of the only warehouse conversion they’ve ever attempted - operated by the company whose guard beat Jeffersonking Anyanwu for asking to use a computer.
That’s who wants to build and run a 9,000-person ICE internment camp inside a warehouse, and dozens more to follow.
While human beings were being beaten, denied medical care, and dying inside ICE internment camps across the country, CoreCivic’s Patrick Swindle got on his own earnings call. And what he told the investors listening is one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever heard a CEO put on record.
“We are confident that the detention beds that we provide are the most humane, most efficient logistically, most compliant, most secure, are readily available, and provide the best value to the government.”
That’s the CEO of a private prison company bragging that they have ‘the most humane’ mass internment camps in America.
He said it the same week a lawsuit described what happened to Javon Gordon at a GEO facility - and amid a growing number of deaths in ICE custody that neither CEO mentioned on either call.
Gordon told guard Berame to stop touching him. Berame and a second guard tackled Gordon and slammed his face into the concrete until he bled from the mouth and the head. Berame climbed on his back. Gordon screamed “I can’t breathe.” They cuffed his hands and legs, kneed him in the ribs, carried him to solitary, put him on suicide watch - he wasn’t suicidal - stripped him naked while a female officer recorded video, took his bed, and left him in a suicide smock. Berame taunted him for a month. A supervisor told Berame to stop. He didn’t.
That’s what they think is the most ‘humane.’ The most ‘compliant.’ The best value to the government.
CoreCivic is the same private prison company that operates the Dilley family internment camp in Texas. Over 6,200 children have been detained by ICE since January 2025, and a lot of them ended up there.
At Dilley, the food is inedible (often worm-infested or moldy), the water isn’t potable and makes kids sick, medical emergencies go ignored, abuse is rampant, and contagious diseases like Covid-19, RSV, and the measles spread unchecked. A case of drinkable water costs upwards of $30 in commissary. Pregnant women have had to forego giving their infants formula because they couldn’t afford water that wouldn’t make them sick.
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Many children at Dilley have been detained for several months, separated from friends, school, pets, and family. Kids have developed depression, anxiety, self-harm behaviors, and other disorders due to the cruelty they have endured. This kind of trauma can cause life-long consequences.
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All the while, executives at for-profit prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group are ringing in record-breaking profits. Revenue "earned" by keeping children in cages. In what CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle calls ‘the most humane’ form of detention.
These people talk about locking human beings in modern concentration camps the way a hotel chain talks about thread counts.
And then a CFO put a price on a human life, out loud, on a recorded earnings call, and nobody on the line flinched.
CoreCivic has nearly 13,000 empty beds ready for ICE. An investor from Noble Capital asked CFO David Garfinkle to dream big about what filling them would look like - “let’s go a little blue sky here” - and Garfinkle did the math out loud, cheerfully, without hesitation:
“If you took 13,000 beds, an average per diem - I don’t know, just say $125 a day - that’s $593 million of incremental revenue. And if you assume we’re on a 23 percent margin in the fourth quarter, that’s $136 million of incremental EBITDA.”
$125 a day. That is what a human being is worth inside an American internment camp. Less than a hotel room. About thirty cappuccinos. That’s what the United States government pays a for-profit corporation to put a person in a cell, feed them, and make sure they can’t leave. That’s what Jeffersonking Anyanwu’s life costs on David Garfinkle’s spreadsheet.
And the 23 percent margin - that’s the distance between what it actually costs to hold a person and what the company charges the government to do it. For every $125, about $29 is profit above operating costs - not reinvested in medical care, not spent on legal access, not used to improve conditions. It services debt, covers executive compensation, and funds the stock buybacks those same executives are using to bet on the growth of mass internment. The human being in the bed becomes a revenue-generating unit whose value to the company depends entirely on them staying in that bed as long as possible.
When an investor asked a CFO to dream big about the future of his company, the dream was filling 13,000 beds with human beings at $125 a head. That’s the blue sky. That’s the dream.
And here is what these companies did while people were being beaten and dying in their camps: they bought back their own stock. As fast as they could. Because they think mass internment is underpriced, and they want in before Wall Street catches on.
CoreCivic repurchased 10 percent of its own company in 2025. GEO bought back 5 million shares. Both boards authorized hundreds of millions more. GEO’s CFO told analysts the stock is “significantly undervalued.” CoreCivic’s said they’d keep buying “at this price.” They are putting their own money - money made from $125-a-day internment of human beings, most who are innocent of any crime - on a bet that the internment camp business is about to get much, much bigger. CoreCivic is projecting 40% earnings growth in 2026, and both companies emphasized that their guidance assumes zero new contract wins - every new contract from here is pure upside.
And the money is already locked in. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave DHS $75 billion through September 2029 - $45 billion earmarked specifically for internment.
That’s not subject to annual budget fights. It’s guaranteed funding for four years. The warehouses being scouted in compliant red-state communities are investments. The 9,000-bed camps aren’t temporary.
Between them, these two companies have roughly 19,000 idle beds ready to activate today, tens of thousands more in the warehouse pipeline, and the government wants 100,000.
They are building permanent infrastructure on permanent money, and they’re telling shareholders to buy in now.
This is not a crisis response. It is a four-year business plan with $45 billion in guaranteed revenue. And they are celebrating.
Seventy thousand human beings are inside this system tonight.
One of them is a father who hasn’t held his children since the arrest. One of them is a student from Nigeria who got beaten for asking to use a computer to defend himself in court. One of them will be the next person to die in an ICE camp, and when they do, no one on a quarterly earnings call will say their name.
They will say “census.” They will say “populations.” They will say “beds.”
On a spreadsheet in an investment bank in Nashville, these people are worth $125 a day and a 23 percent margin. On a conference call at a CEO’s mansion in Boca Raton, they’re the “highest level of populations we’ve ever had.”
And the men who keep those spreadsheets - who celebrated record profits while guards assaulted detained men down the hall - just told Wall Street that the best is yet to come.
Samantha Boucher is the founder and Executive Director of Arsenal PAC and creator of ResistMap, a civil watch platform tracking ICE enforcement and extremist activity across the United States.
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