#corecivic

By: Patrick Terpstra

Posted 5:43 PM, Feb 16, 2026

The first year of President Trump's push to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants was a financial boon for two companies that own and operate private detention centers.

CoreCivic and The GEO Group both reported their year-end earnings for 2025.

Each company reported seeing a boost in revenue of more than 13 percent, both making more than $2 billion.

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

A federal appeals court in Texas just handed immigration authorities the power to lock people up indefinitely. In Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the government may hold immigrants in ICE detention without ever providing a bond hearing. In practical terms, tens of thousands can now be jailed for months or even years while their cases wind through the system, with no judge deciding whether continued confinement is necessary.

This is an extreme ruling by two extremist jurists, the most radical pair of judges on the Fifth Circuit, Edith H. Jones and Kyle Duncan. But it does not arrive in a vacuum. The decision adds a legal imprimatur on existing ICE detention centers—really, concentration camps—that routinely fail to provide basic human needs, adequate medical care or timely case resolution. Once indefinite detention is stacked on top of this, the human misery and civil rights violations will skyrocket.

What the case held

In Buenrostro-Mendez, two members of a Fifth Circuit panel accepted the government’s argument that immigrants can be detained without any opportunity for a bond hearing, based solely on how they are classified under immigration law. Under their erroneous interpretation of the law, someone who crossed the border years ago, built a life here and was later arrested may be treated just like someone stopped at the border yesterday. That’s because both supposedly are “seeking admission” to the U.S., and therefore both can be held without bond. That is a devastating conclusion. Bond hearings are one of the few remaining pressure points in an overburdened immigration system. Cases often take months or years to resolve. And while a bond hearing does not guarantee release, it requires the government to explain to a judge why continued detention is justified. As Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck explained, the idea that the government may simply detain people indefinitely without bond is an “extreme minority view.” Indeed, as Kyle Cheney of Politico reported, “[A]t least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy—in more than 3,000 cases—while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.”

Other jurisdictions have encountered this very issue and soundly rejected the government’s flawed “seeking admission” argument. The advancement of that argument even caused a backlog of cases in Minneapolis, leading Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz to accuse ICE of violating nearly 100 court orders requiring the release of individuals the government was purporting to hold under this strained interpretation. Judge Schiltz wrote, “This Court recently held that, because such aliens are not ‘seeking admission’ [as required under the mandatory detention law], that provision does not apply to them,” citing his own decision of November 25, 2025.

“Seeking admission” explained

With the government relying so much on these two words to indefinitely hold tens of thousands of people, the question is worth unpacking. The government’s position—now adopted by the Fifth Circuit—is that anyone who entered the country without formal permission is always “seeking admission,” even years later and even when arrested far from the border. Under this theory, such individuals are treated as if they are perpetually standing at the border.

Many judges have explained why that just doesn’t fly. District Court Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York summed it up best using a simple analogy: Someone who sneaks into a movie theater and sits down would not ordinarily be described later as “seeking admission” to the theater. Such persons are already in. They are seeking to remain. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the SDNY likewise concluded that the government’s interpretation ignored the structure of the statute and collapsed distinctions Congress deliberately created.

[...]

ICE will capitalize on the decision

Even if the decision is ultimately overturned, it could remain binding law in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi for months or longer. These states already house a significant share of the nation’s detention facilities. But it gets worse. As Professor Vladeck noted, the way the law gets interpreted affects whether detainees receive individualized review, whether they are transferred between facilities, and how long they remain in custody without judicial oversight. Importantly, detention challenges generally must be filed where a person is currently being held. That means ICE can also influence which law applies by deciding where to detain people. Advocates have long warned that this creates incentives to transfer detainees into Fifth Circuit states, where bond hearings are now harder to obtain. We are seeing that happen already.

[...]

Overcrowded, unsanitary and dangerous conditions

In many ICE facilities, the number of detainees is creating severe overcrowding without any apparent plan to alleviate it. A former worker at an ICE detention facility in Baltimore described inhumane conditions there. “I worked there for several months and it was probably day one, day two that I saw the abuse,” the whistleblower said, speaking to CBS News affiliate WUSA9 through an anonymizing voice filter. “I saw people laying in feces. People throwing up, people laying in urine.” The former employee provided internal ICE headcount sheets from December showing 47, 50 and 56 detainees in the same cell and as many as 50 in an even smaller cell.

[...]

Lack of adequate medical care

Across ICE facilities, detainees have also reported long delays in receiving medical attention. Journalists have documented cases in which individuals were told to wait or self-treat until symptoms worsened. In some instances, people were hospitalized only after collapsing. Mother Jones shockingly reported that ICE has not paid third-party providers for medical care since October 2025 and has no mechanism to provide prenatal care. Reporting by the Nevada Independent highlighted this lack of prenatal care for pregnant women at the Henderson Detention Center. Emine Ş—an asylum seeker from Turkey who was legally in this country at the time she was detained—spent the first few months of her high-risk pregnancy incarcerated there with no prenatal care whatsoever. She was only released following the paper’s reporting.

[...]

The detention industrial complex

There’s another disturbing facet to all this we shouldn’t overlook. Immigration detention has quickly become a big business operated by a few key private contractors. For example, GEO Group and CoreCivic manage many ICE facilities. In public filings, both describe immigration detention as a major source of revenue. These management contracts are generally structured around per-diem payments, often with guaranteed minimums. As a result, revenue depends in significant part on occupancy levels and average length of detention. That creates a perverse incentive to house more people for longer, all so these contractors can charge the government more money.

A 3-judge panel on the ultra-right 5th Circuit Court ruled in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi that permits the government to hold immigrants in ICE detention without ever providing a bond hearing, perhaps for years. This ruling is an abject disaster for human rights.

See Also:

The same oligarchs that own Geo Group companies and Core Civic in the US also own correctional, software, and security / surveillance companies in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand