The other big election winners? Private Prisons – Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday sent shares of private prison companies soaring, as investors expect the president-elect’s promises on mass deportations will increase the need for immigration detention.

Shares of GEO Group and CoreCivic, the country’s largest private prison operators, rose 42 percent and 29 percent on Wednesday respectively. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group was “the biggest winner in the U.S. stock market – among companies of all sizes.”

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

Zoley noticed that too, according to HuffPostthat GEO Group is well positioned to scale the number of ICE detention beds from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state and local governments – including 85,000 beds – could also be tailored to federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have the highest priority for all available beds across the country.”

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

Trump did that in a second term promised to fulfill his promise and carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His followers, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal solutions to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed by the courts.

This time, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century law of war, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and they plan to reform the federal bureaucracy to ensure that happens, through executive orders and fill the government with loyalists who want it. implement the policy quickly. “No one is off the table” said Tom Homan, former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you are in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have their way, armed forces and law enforcement agencies from out of state will likely storm into communities — knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and randomly interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly do that ensnare Also American citizens.