MAGA Inc.: CoreCivic

In late August 2025, around 500 migrants were taken to a detention center in California City in the Mojave desert some 100 miles north of Los Angeles. This former state government-run facility, which was shuttered in 2023, was re-opened under contract to CoreCivic, a private prison giant, to house a surge in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees.

(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.) 

“The living conditions are inhumane. We have all kinds of health hazards. It’s dirty, they don’t clean up or have any chemicals to clean. It’s unsanitary,” Sokhean Keo, a detainee at the facility, told the Fresno Bee newspaper.

Other detainees described the facility as “a torture chamber,” “a zoo” and “hell on earth.” Alfredo Parada Calderon, a California City detainee, told the Guardian newspaper: “We are civilians. They treat us like a bunch of animals.” 

Another detainee who asked to be referred to as Jon (a pseudonym) told the Guardian that the CoreCivic staff would often yell: ‘Get your hands on the wall and spread your legs.” When detainees asked why, the guards would say: ‘It’s procedure. If you don’t like it, too bad.’”

A month after it opened, approximately 100 of the detainees conducted sit-ins and refused to eat to protest their mistreatment. CoreCivic officers retaliated by pepper-spraying some of the protestors, putting others in solitary confinement, threatening force while delaying medications to some and restricting telephone access.

“No matter how you spin it, these are prisons,” Faisal Al-Juburi of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, an immigrant rights group in Texas, told the Miami Herald newspaper. Yet roughly half of ICE detainees have no criminal record and are being held on civil charges.

CoreCivic

CoreCivic, a Brentwood, Tennessee-based company (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America), runs 44 correctional and detention facilities and 20 residential re-entry centers, or “halfway houses,” across 20 U.S. states. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, a human rights group, alleges that the company has a long history of mismanagement, forced labor, inhumane living conditions, excessive use of force, prolonged use of solitary confinement, medical negligence, physical and sexual abuse, spying and voyeurism, overcrowding, understaffing and other human rights violations at its various detention facilities.

Despite this, the Trump administration will pay CoreCivic up to US$130 million in annual revenue to operate the California City Immigration Processing Center, California’s largest ICE detention facility, through August 2027.

It is just one of many facilities that have been pressed into service or expanded to handle the thousands of people detained under Trump’s “national emergency.” 

New Contracts

The Trump administration has also awarded contracts to CoreCivic to reopen or take over the following facilities: 

•    South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (worth US$180 million annually)
•    Midwest Regional Reception Center in Leavenworth, Kansas (worth US$60 million annually)
•    Farmville Detention Center in Farmville, Virginia (worth US$40 million annually)
•    Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma (worth US$100 million annually)
•    West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason, Tennessee (worth up to US$35 million annually)  
•    facilities in Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio and Oklahoma.

Since Trump’s return to the Oval Office, CoreCivic executives have boasted about speaking on an almost “hourly” basis with ICE officials and members of the Trump administration to assist ICE in its goal of expanding detention capacity to over 107,000 by January 2026 and beyond.

Pushback

Immigrant rights advocates are supporting the California City detainees. They have accused the city of not enforcing state laws that require public meetings and adequate notice before permits are issued for privately-run immigration detention centers.

California City Mayor Marquette Hawkins has dismissed the protestors’ concerns, maintaining that conditions at the facility appeared to be humane and claiming that the city is unable to shutter the project, which is expected to produce millions of dollars in revenue to the city.

The lack of support from city officials has fueled detainees and activists to take matters into their own hands. In mid-September 2025, a California City detainee, anonymously identified as John Doe, and Dignity Not Detention Coalition, a group of immigrant rights organizations, sued the city and CoreCivic, accusing the company of illegally opening the detention center without the necessary permits.

“Because the city wasn’t really working with us or following California law, we sued both the city and CoreCivic,” Jehan Laner, senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, told the Fresno Bee newspaper. “You didn’t do anything that you would have done for a restaurant to open in California City.”
 
On November 12, seven detainees sued ICE over conditions at the California City facility, alleging filthy living units, extremely cold temperatures, grossly subpar medical care, insufficient food and water, limitations on family visits, excessive solitary confinement, failure to accommodate religious activities, failure to accommodate people with disabilities and denial of access to legal counsel.

“No human being, immigrant or not, should be subjected to these horrendous conditions," said Gustavo Guevara, one of the plaintiffs. "I hope society becomes aware of the abuse, neglect, indifference, and the overall unjust treatment we are being subjected to, and does not turn a blind eye. It’s not right that because we’re immigrants they feel they can treat us this way.”   

A second battlefront has opened against CoreCivic in Leavenworth, Kansas, where community members are opposing CoreCivic’s plans to reopen its Leavenworth facility, which has previously been described by a U.S. federal judge as “an absolute hell hole.”

When CoreCivic announced in 2025 that it would be reactivating the facility without a permit pursuant to a no-bid contract with ICE, local residents and former employees testified against allowing the company to do so. (This is a city where Trump won over 60 percent of the 2024 general election vote.)

“They’re not looking out for the safety of their inmates or staff,” Marcia Levering, a former correctional officer at the Leavenworth facility, told the Marshall Project, a nonprofit that covers the criminal justice system. “They’re looking out for their own self-interest, which is taking the taxpayers’ money to line the pockets of their higher-ups.” 

After a unanimous City resolution was passed, requiring CoreCivic to comply with a local ordinance, the city of Leavenworth filed a lawsuit to block CoreCivic from reopening the center without a proper permit.

A Kansas judge issued a temporary injunction prohibiting CoreCivic from reopening the center while the litigation was pending, prompting CoreCivic to appeal the decision.
 
CoreCivic suffered another blow when a separate case it filed against the city of Leavenworth was tossed out by the court in late November. The company then reversed course and applied for a permit in December.
 
Leavenworth residents and activists again mobilized to ask that city officials deny CoreCivic’s permit application. “I’m here tonight to ask and encourage you to continue defending Leavenworth from the historic mismanagement and negligence of CoreCivic and to do what you can to block CoreCivic and ICE from opening a detention center here in our community,” James Gillcrist, an Iraq War veteran, said during a public comment session at a city council meeting.

Despite the public’s strong vocal opposition, the city commission approved CoreCivic’s permit application in March 2026. Activists, however, remain undeterred. “Our work here, throughout the entire three years that we’ve been involved in this, is not in vain,” Karla Juarez, executive director of Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, an organizing group in Kansas and Missouri, said after the final commission meeting. “I see new faces. I see new people advocating. New people making public comments. New people, actually a lot of people who believed that CoreCivic should open, now on our side.” 

‘I had eaten worms’

California City and Leavenworth are hardly alone.

In October 2025, detainees at Farmville Detention Center in Farmville, Virginia reported worms in their food, calling for a meeting with CoreCivic and ICE officials. “The situation scared us. Once we noticed that there were worms in several other people’s food, I felt sick. I had eaten worms,” said one detainee. 

That same month, CoreCivic staff at the South Central Correctional Facility in Wayne County, Tennessee were accused of violence, extortion, drug abuse and neglect. Amelia Waters, whose son is held at the center, told the Nashville Banner, an online newspaper: “When they do get food, which is not regular — it sometimes can be 2 p.m. before they get breakfast — the food is mostly inedible.” Amy, the mother of a man who was transferred to the same center, said that he saw “sewage ...backing up in the floor, backing up in the showers.”

The Cibola County Correctional Center, operated by CoreCivic in New Mexico, is under investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for alleged drug smuggling and violence. A detainee recalled being threatened along with his friend by a drug dealer at the center in May 2025, telling the Guardian newspaper that the dealer said, ‘I’ll give each of you [US]$500. Accept it, or I’ll kill you.’ And we stood there with our mouths open.”

Earlier, Wired magazine reported that the CoreCivic-run Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia was experiencing overcrowding and a surge in medical emergencies. “[O]nce Trump took over, they were rolling out mats in the halls. People were sleeping out there,” Emelie (a pseudonym), whose husband was detained at Stewart until his deportation in May 2025, told the magazine. “You don’t stand a chance at Stewart,” she added. “It’s a death sentence for you and your family.”

CoreCivic’s Eloy Detention Center in Arizona has also been accused of exposing detainees to dangers, including extreme heat. “Sometimes the A/C goes out for a week. Sometimes 15 days,” a detainee said in a statement provided by the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit legal services organization. Another detainee said that the heat “makes you feel like you’re suffocating.” 

At least seven rapes and four attempted sexual assaults were reported at CoreCivic's Otay Mesa immigration detention center in San Diego, California, in 2025. However, CalMatters journalists discovered that the local sheriff's office took no action because it had signed a memorandum of understanding allowing the company to look into the allegations internally.

“We’re horrified but not surprised to learn that numerous sexual assaults went uninvestigated at a CoreCivic facility,” said Susan Beaty, senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice advocacy group.

Making matters worse is the fact that ICE has refused to allow local county inspectors to visit the site.

And in Texas, state officials reported a measles outbreak in February 2026 at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, run by CoreCivic, where some 1,400 people were being held, including children and infants.

“The active measles infections at Dilley have only exacerbated our grave concerns. This is an untenable situation with a simple solution — families should never be detained,” Neha Desai, a lawyer for the National Center for Youth Law, told the Texas Tribune. “Some children have come in sick and have gotten worse while detained. Others have come in relatively healthy and become seriously ill while detained.”

Company Response

Meanwhile, the company has been gushing about its new contracts with the Trump administration. “Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's then-CEO, told investors on a May 2025 call.

The financial gains from CoreCivic’s ICE contracts are already being realized. In the fourth quarter of 2025, CoreCivic recorded US$604 million in revenue, a 26 percent jump compared to last year’s fourth quarter. 

CoreCivic’s soaring profits, however, come from “the destruction of human lives as directed by the Trump administration and made possible by the majority Congress,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director for the Detention Watch Network, a coalition that aims to end immigration detention, told the Guardian newspaper.