By Rob C.
Art by Jim Morrissey
TL;DR: Private prison companies are experiencing the most profitable years in their histories. At the same time, ICE has received tens of billions of dollars to dramatically expand detention capacity, while deaths inside detention facilities continue to rise.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a system designed to convert human suffering into corporate revenue.
At the center of that system sits Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Miller’s mass deportation vision provides the arrests. ICE provides the detention pipeline. GEO Group and CoreCivic provide the beds. Shareholders collect the profits. Human beings pay the price.
The tragedy is not merely that this system exists. The tragedy is that it is working exactly as designed.
Stephen Miller’s fever dream.
For decades, America has produced political figures who promised to be tough on immigration. Miller is different. He isn’t simply advocating stricter enforcement. He has spent most of his adult life pursuing an ideological project rooted in nativism, demographic panic, and the belief that America must be reshaped through mass deportation and exclusion.
Now he sits near the center of federal power.
As Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in Trump’s second administration, Miller has more influence than ever over immigration policy, detention operations, and deportation strategy. While most Americans see immigration as a political issue, Miller appears to see it as a demographic war. His public statements, policy proposals, and operational directives consistently point toward one objective: creating a country that is increasingly hostile to immigrants and increasingly welcoming to aggressive enforcement. He personally issued a 3,000-person daily arrest quota, ordered denaturalization programs to strip citizenship from people of color, and is actively working to make the U.S. an “armed gated community for real Americans” (white people).
Not “border security.” Ethnic cleansing. He’s used the term himself—or at least the sanitized version: “ethnonationalist strategy for white replenishment.”
Let that sink in. The man now directly controlling ICE operations has literally stated his goal is to change the racial composition of America. By force.
Miller didn’t hide this. He described his mass deportation plans “gleefully” as “greater than any national infrastructure project” the U.S. has ever undertaken. He envisions red state deportation armies, mass detention camps, and daily ICE flights. His stated goal is to transform America into an “armed gated community for real Americans”—which, in Miller-speak, means white people from 1950s suburban catalogues.
The remarkable part is not that Miller’s agenda exists. The remarkable part is that someone figured out how to monetize it. Because while politicians argue about borders, private prison corporations are posting record profits.
GEO Group reported approximately $254 million in profit in early 2026, a 700% increase from 2024, an extraordinary increase. The company secured roughly $520 million in new and expanded government contracts in a single year, the largest contract haul in its history. CoreCivic posted profits exceeding $116 million and projected even higher revenues moving forward. Revenue tied directly to ICE detention contracts surged as detention populations expanded.
For shareholders, these numbers represent growth.
For detainees, they represent something very different.
The business model is elegantly simple. The federal government allocates billions for detention expansion. ICE increases arrests. More detainees require more beds. Private prison corporations receive larger contracts. Investors receive larger returns. Politicians claim they are restoring law and order.
Everyone in the chain gets paid except the people inside the cages.
It’s so lucrative that investors are literally frustrated there aren’t more people being detained. According to reports, some private prison investors complained that “the pace of detention by ICE has been below what people thought it was going to be.” Translation: They want more people imprisoned so they can make more money.
Think about that for a moment. Somewhere in America, investors were frustrated because there wasn’t enough human misery to satisfy quarterly projections.
Maximum Misery for Your Money
That business is now receiving staggering levels of taxpayer support.
Recent federal legislation allocated roughly $75 billion over four years for immigration enforcement and detention infrastructure. More than $38 billion was designated specifically for detention facilities and related construction. As I recently reported, many have been purchased at highly inflated prices. ICE’s annual budget has ballooned to roughly $27.7 billion—larger than the military budgets of many sovereign nations.
A domestic law enforcement agency now operates with resources exceeding those available to entire countries. Remember: Immigration enforcement is “civil” enforcement, not criminal. ICE is now militarized in full tactical gear, armed to the teeth.
The goal is equally staggering. ICE is seeking detention capacity for more than 100,000 people daily, with infrastructure capable of holding approximately 116,000 detainees at a time.
This is no longer traditional immigration enforcement.
This is industrial-scale detention.
The human consequences become visible when we examine what happens inside these facilities.
Detention is a death Sentence.
Eighteen people have died in ICE custody in the first four months of 2026 alone. That’s on pace to exceed the 31-33 deaths in 2025. Half of those deaths occurred in facilities operated by private prison contractors, CoreCivic or GEO Group.
Behind every statistic is a story.
Chaofeng Ge arrived at a GEO Group facility in Pennsylvania in mental distress, having attempted suicide in state custody. He received no mental health treatment in five days at the facility. No one spoke Mandarin. He went unmonitored and was eventually found hanged in a shower stall. One less detainee to profit from? No—GEO Group still gets paid.
Jose Ramos, 75 years old, died at CoreCivic’s Krome facility in June 2025 with heart problems and inadequate medical care. He was the oldest detainee to die in ICE custody since 2006.
Denny Adan Gonzalez, 33, died April 28, 2026 at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia—the second death at that facility under the current administration.
Seven suicides have reportedly occurred since October 2025, making it one of the deadliest periods in ICE detention history.
California’s attorney general found “crisis-level healthcare understaffing” at detention facilities. Fewer physicians. Fewer advanced practitioners. But 20 times more detainees. The calculation is simple: Cut medical staff, house more people, maximize profit, accept the deaths as operating expenses.
And profits continued rising.
That is the defining feature of this system.
The incentives reward expansion, not care.
A Bipartisan Approach
None of this exists solely because of Donald Trump. One of the uncomfortable realities often ignored by partisan narratives is that America’s detention infrastructure has bipartisan roots.
Obama deported 5.3 million people during his eight years in office. He earned the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from immigrant rights groups. In 2013 alone, his administration deported a record 438,421 people. More than any president in history. More than the sum of all 20th-century presidents combined.
Civil rights organizations protested enforcement practices long before Donald Trump returned to office.
The difference? Obama wasn’t openly admitting his goal was ethnic cleansing. He wasn’t saying he wanted to “whiten” America. He wasn’t stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans based on trivial paperwork discrepancies. But he did build the infrastructure. He did normalize mass deportation. He did expand ICE. And private prisons profited.
GEO Group and CoreCivic have donated roughly $500,000 to Republican congressmembers and $57,000 to Democratic congressmembers from 2021 through 2025. Both parties take the money. Both parties benefit from the system. The only difference is Republicans are by far the biggest winners in the money game and are honest about their racism.
The companies are not ideological. They are profitable. If mass detention becomes national policy, they win regardless of the rhetoric used to justify it.
The contradictions become impossible to ignore when protests emerge.
In May 2026, demonstrations erupted around Delaney Hall, a GEO-operated detention facility in Newark. Activists raised concerns about medical care, living conditions, and detainee treatment. Protesters demanded accountability and transparency.
The response was familiar. Police in riot gear appeared. Mounted officers entered crowds. Tear gas was deployed. Arrests followed.
Democratic politicians often speak passionately about protecting immigrant communities. Yet when protests challenge the detention apparatus directly, state power frequently responds the same way it always does: with police, barriers, and force.
This is one of the central contradictions of modern American politics.
Republicans openly celebrate the detention machine. Democrats frequently criticize it while continuing to support significant parts of it.
Meanwhile, the machine keeps growing.
And at the center of that growth remains Stephen Miller.
The Miller Effect
Stephen Miller openly embraces what others often conceal. Previous administrations defended deportations as legal enforcement. Miller increasingly frames them as cultural preservation.
Here’s what makes Miller different. He’s not hiding. He’s not using code words. He’s explicitly stated his goal is to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, deport millions based on race, and transform America into a white ethnostate. And he’s in charge.
Miller also ordered the Department of Justice to revive denaturalization programs. Prosecutors now have monthly quotas for stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans—often for trivial or decades-old paperwork discrepancies. DACA recipients aren’t safe. TPS holders aren’t safe. Green card holders aren’t safe. Even U.S. citizens of color aren’t safe.
He’s asked immigration officials how immigrants use credit cards, apparently as part of an effort to cut off their ability to open bank accounts. He’s pushing legislation in Tennessee and Oklahoma requiring hospitals, schools, and social services to report when undocumented immigrants use their services. He’s manufacturing illegality to render people vulnerable.
Two million people have already self-deported as of January 2026, fleeing before the terror escalates further.
His reported push for dramatically expanded arrest quotas, larger detention capacity, and more aggressive enforcement creates exactly the conditions private prison corporations need. More arrests generate more detainees. More detainees generate more contracts. More contracts generate more profits.
It is a perfect marriage between ideological extremism and corporate greed.
One side gets its demographic project. The other gets its quarterly earnings.
Everyone else gets the bill.
A Question of Conscience
The deeper question is not whether immigration laws should exist. Every nation enforces borders. Every nation regulates migration. Reasonable people can disagree about policy.
The question is whether we are comfortable creating a system where human detention becomes a growth industry.
When corporate earnings depend upon keeping detention beds full, perverse incentives emerge. Human beings become inventory. Families become revenue streams. Suffering becomes a business opportunity.
That is not law enforcement. That is commodification.
We chose this. We funded this. We elected the people who allocated $38+ billion to build the infrastructure for ethnic cleansing. We allowed private companies to profit from human suffering. We normalized mass deportation under Obama and supercharged it under Trump. We let Stephen Miller openly state his white nationalist goals and then we handed him $38 billion.
We could have stopped this at any step. We didn’t. We still haven’t.
America now spends tens of billions of dollars expanding detention infrastructure while millions struggle with housing costs, medical debt, and underfunded public services. We somehow found unlimited money for cages while insisting we could not afford universal healthcare, affordable housing, or comprehensive immigration reform.
The priorities tell the story.
Have we lost our compassion? Immigration has been vital to our economy since we became a nation. We have a moral obligation to humane treatment. These same people claim to have Christian values—but there’s nothing Christian about what’s happening.
We need a reset. We need to dismantle the private prison industry. We need to end detention for profit. We need to create pathways to legal status, actual integration programs, healthcare, and compassion. We need to reject the white nationalist ideology dressed up as “enforcement.”
We are funding detention because detention is profitable for certain corporations.
We are expanding incarceration because incarceration creates political and financial rewards.
The result is a system where detainees die, shareholders celebrate, politicians posture, and nothing fundamentally changes.
The question is whether we finally decide human beings are worth more than quarterly earnings reports.
F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
Please like, share, and subscribe—because if private prison investors are literally complaining there aren’t enough detainees to maximize profits, maybe the problem isn’t immigration. Maybe the problem is that we’ve turned human suffering into a profit center.
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Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.