A private prison boom is expected as Trump plans mass deportations — and your retirement savings may be invested in these controversial companies. Here’s how to check your exposure
Mass deportations are being planned by the U.S. government — and that could mean a big boom in business for private prisons.
As of March 9, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was holding 46,269 people people, according to the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). This is the highest number of detainees since October 2019.
The Adams County detention center in Natchez, Mississippi, which held the largest number of ICE detainees so far in fiscal 2025, averaging 2,153 per day, is owned and operated by a publicly-traded company called CoreCivic (CXW).
The stock has soared 54.52% in the last six months.
The GEO Group (CXW), another operator of private prisons, has seen its shares double in value since Donald Trump’s election win.
Investors have poured money into these stocks since mass deportations will likely require an increase in immigration detention facilities.
In November, George Zoley, The GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman, told stakeholders in an earnings call that the company “was built for this unique moment.”
“ICE detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit,” wrote Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen who was recently detained by U.S. authorities for two weeks. “It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560 million from ICE contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763 million from ICE contracts.”
While for-profit private prison companies are reportedly set to make billions reopening jails for ICE, your retirement savings may be invested in and supporting these firms, whether you like it or not. Investors with moral and ethical concerns over benefiting from mass deportations may be unknowingly invested in these stocks through exchange-traded funds or mutual funds.
Here’s how to know your exposure and what you can do about it.
Both The GEO Group and CoreCivic plan to benefit from mass deportations.
In December, The GEO Group announced a $70 million investment to “deliver expanded detention capacity, secure transportation, and electronic monitoring services” to ICE. According to the press release, it’s currently the largest service provider to ICE, “providing approximately 21,000 detention beds (with a present census of 14,000) at 16 ICE Processing Centers with the ability to expand to a minimum of 32,000 beds at 23 facilities.”
The for-profit company plans to reopen Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey — an immigration detention center with 1,000 beds — though Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has threatened to issue a stop-work order. Other plans include potentially repurposing Federal Correctional Institute (FCI) Dublin to hold mass deportees. FCI Dublin, located in California, was permanently closed last year after years of incarcerated women reporting staff sexual misconduct allegations against.
Last month, CoreCivic inked a deal with ICE to expand its detention capacity for up to 784 detainees at facilities in Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio and Oklahoma. It also announced it would reopen its family detention center in Texas, which was built to house 2,400 people, including children.
The Texas detention center was shut down last year to save costs, though there have long been reports of poor treatment. A toddler reportedly died six weeks after leaving the facility in 2018 and the “unsanitary conditions” were blamed.
If you don’t want to invest in for-profit private prisons, you’ll first need to find out if you already are and don’t realize it. A publicly available resource is Prison Free Funds, operated by non-profit shareholder advocacy group As You Sow (keep in mind, it is not an investment adviser).
Prison Free Funds provides a database of more than 3,000 stock funds available in the U.S., allowing you to search for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from your 401(k), retirement plan or personal portfolio by name, ticker or asset manager. It allows you to screen for both companies involved in the prison industry and companies involved in the militarization of borders and the policing of immigration.
The percentage of total assets and amount of money invested in private prison operators are also highlighted, if you want to specifically avoid having those in your portfolio. For instance, the Invesco S&P SmallCap Industrials ETF has 2.43% of assets or $5.1 million invested in The GeoGroup and CoreCivic.
Some index funds that get an “F” rating from Prison Free Funds include AMG River Road Small Cap Value Fund, USA Mutuals Vice Fund and BlackRock LifePath® Index 2040 Fund K, among others.
The site also allows you to search for sustainably-invested mutual funds and ETFs.
If you’re an individual investor, you could consider talking to your financial adviser about prison-free investing. If you’re saving for retirement through an employer-sponsored plan such as a 401(k), Prison Free Funds has an action toolkit that involves building a coalition and advocating for new offerings.
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
