The Other Big Election Winners? Private Prisons

Sue Ogrocki/AP

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.