Compared to its recent November notice, ICE was more detailed about its plans for 2025 in a different notice released last year. This earlier notice shows that ICE was preparing for a more intense immigration policy on the horizon, regardless of who ultimately won the election.
In the 2023 notice, ICE says ISAP’s main program, Alternatives to Detention, would be renamed Release Management and Reporting. This new program would involve monitoring every non-detained person who is awaiting a court hearing or deportation, instead of just a few. At the time the notice was published, ICE said 5.7 million people were eligible to be monitored under the new program, meaning that if implemented, the scale of ICE’s remote surveillance would increase by about a 3,000 percent.
According to a government contracts database, BI Incorporated has been ICE’s ISAP contractor since at least 2005. The company is a subsidiary of GEO Group, which is one of the largest private prison companies in the United States.
Although the stock market as a whole rose the day after Trump’s victory, the momentum in GEO Group’s stock made it “the biggest gainer in the U.S. stock market, among companies of any size.” , according to the Robinhood-owned investment news site. Sherwood News. Is quinquennial contract to run ISAP, is it worth it 2.2 billion dollarsIt is scheduled to expire next year.
In a post-election earnings call for GEO Group, CEO Brian Evans said the company could increase its ISAP capacity by “several hundred thousand participants, and up to several million if necessary,” as reported by HuffPo. The company’s director of operations, Wayne Calabrese, added that they have already informed ICE that they are ready to do so.
“We hope that the incoming Trump administration will take a much broader approach to monitoring the several million people currently on the non-detained immigration docket,” Calabrese said on the call.
According HuffPoGEO Group competitor CoreCivic (previously called Corrections Corporation of America) had its own post-election results call, during which CEO Damon Hininger said the timing of ICE’s Nov. 6 notice was “probably not a coincidence.” .
“We took that as a very encouraging sign,” Hininger said.