As Private Prison Stocks Soar, Immigrant Rights Activists Vow to Fight Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

Incoming President Trump’s vow to deport millions of immigrants when he starts his term has sent private prison stocks soaring. In an earnings call with investors Thursday, GEO Group CEO Brian Robert Evans and Chairperson George Zoley hailed what they called an “unprecedented opportunity.”

GEOGE ZOLEY: We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security, as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals. We stand ready to provide additional services and resources to help ICE meet its future needs.

BRIAN VIOLINO: Great. And then, you know, there was some additional talk about the air services contract. I think that’s $25 million in annualized revenue. You know, I think we have a pretty good idea of the potential size of the detention [inaudible] program in a new administration, but could you help us try to size this air services opportunity? And then, what kind of margins do you generate in that business?

BRIAN ROBERT EVANS: You know, I think, to speak in generalities, we’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services, whether it’s in the detention segment, in the transportation segment, as well as the ISAP program. Of course, this will depend on Congress providing the required funding.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on how both the private prison corporations and immigrant rights advocates are preparing for the incoming Trump administration, we’re joined by Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Her new article for Truthout is headlined “Trump 2.0 Poses an Even Bigger Threat to Migrants. Here’s How We Fight Back.”

Silky, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, earlier, we played the clip of Stephen Miller, one of the top people to be in charge of what Trump is calling the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. He says, “Seal the borders.” He says, “Detain people” — they’re talking about on military bases and building other detention sites — “and then fly them out.” And we’re hearing from GEO Group right now. Put this all together.

SILKY SHAH: Yeah, I mean, I think what we’ve heard — and thank you so much for having me. What we’ve heard so much over the last year and since Project 2025 came out, and, you know, in so many ways, the first sort of Trump campaign was defined by the border wall, and this one is really defined by mass deportations. And we actually have experience of an era when we had mass deportations, especially in recent memory. Under the Obama administration, this is what we saw, some 400,000 people being deported within the interior of the country, people currently living in the U.S., often being deported through a lot of sort of relationships with local sheriffs, with contracts with county jails, with expansion of contracts with private prison companies, which we’ve just seen expand, expand, expand. Both during Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, we’ve just seen private prison companies take over even more and more of immigration detention.

And so, it’s going to be — it’s, you know, local police, ICE agents, CBP agents. There’s so many different entities involved that are going to — you know, are going to be a part of the sort of mass deportation agenda that Trump is putting out there. And I think that is both terrifying but also something that we fought back against before, and we have to sort of prepare ourselves to start sort of throwing the wrenches in that strategy now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Silky Shah, you mentioned that we’ve had this experience before with the Obama administration. But this has been a regular feature of American — the American economy and American capitalism now for much longer, going back to the 1930s with the mass deportations under President Hoover, in the 1950s under President Eisenhower with Operation Wetback, and even in the Bush administration, obviously, with the workplace raids that occurred after the immigrant protests of 2006 that swept across the country. And yet the undocumented population continues to grow, despite all of these dragnets that the federal government periodically gets into. I’m wondering your sense of what the more correct or judicious approach of the federal government should be toward surges in immigration.

SILKY SHAH: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to understand that often what happens whenever there are moments of — like we’re in right now, of economic insecurity, of sort of depletion of social safety nets, there is this sort of scapegoating that happens to immigrant communities. We saw it both from the Republicans this election cycle, we also saw it from the Democrats this election cycle, where they really abandoned a pro-immigrant stance, which is so concerning and which is going to make our sort of strategy to fight back against this mass deportation agenda that much harder.

But, you know, what we saw, especially under the Obama administration, when we fought those mass deportations, there was a lot of ways to sort of intervene. And one was through sanctuary policy. We had local and state-level officials, and then this expanded even during Trump, where more and more sanctuary policies passed and protected immigrant communities from deportation. And Obama was even compelled, because of the outrage around mass deportations, to implement things like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status for millions of people, many of whom who will now be potentially subject to deportation and family separation in the coming years.

And so, I do think there are a lot of opportunities to provide relief for communities, to create legal pathways for people who want to come, to stop this sort of manufactured and created chaos at the border, instead of this sort of enforcement-only approach that we’ve seen in immigration for decades.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And do you have a sense of what potentially President Biden could still do in his last months in office to, somehow or other, provide relief for some of the migrants?

SILKY SHAH: Absolutely. I mean, there are several requests for, proposals, information for new detention centers around the country, seven, eight detention centers. And what we know is that one of the ways that deportation is facilitated is by having detention capacity. This is one of the reasons we argue for shutting down detention centers. When you take a detention center away from a community, people are less likely to be targeted in that community. And so, we are asking the Biden administration to rescind those contracts immediately, rescind — like, start shutting down facilities now, facilities that could easily be shut down today. They have a lot of power to do that and sort of make it harder for the Trump administration to put these new contracts in place.

And also to release people from detention. Many people are vulnerable. Many people are — detention is completely up to the discretion of ICE. They can easily release people and let them be in community, get the services that they need, get the legal support they need, so that they can go through their immigration proceedings not in detention. We also really — you know, the president has a lot of ability to have presidential pardons. So many of the people who are caught up in ICE detention have past criminal convictions for which they’ve already been in the criminal legal system for, and sort of applying those pardons, you know, clemency at the state level.

Other things that we can do to make it so people aren’t subject to the mass deportation agenda, we know the Trump administration and Trump has really been focusing on that sort of, quote-unquote — like, focusing on, quote-unquote, “criminals.” And that is what we’re going to see. We’re going to see them working with local sheriffs. And we need to do everything we can to sort of make sure that the criminal legal system isn’t used again for this mass deportation roundup.

AMY GOODMAN: Silky Shah, we want to thank you so much for being with us, speaking to us from Bellingham, Washington, executive director of Detention Watch Network. We’ll link to your Truthout piece, “Trump 2.0 Poses an Even Bigger Threat to Migrants. Here’s How We Fight Back.”

Coming up, American Coup: Wilmington 1898, a new PBS film, is premiering tonight, on white supremacists in North Carolina who carried out a massacre and a coup to overthrow the elected government in a Black-majority city. Back in 20 seconds.