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.
GEO Group's executive chairman George Zoley called 2025 the "most successful year for new business wins in our company's history."
The two companies opened nine new detention centers across the country under contracts with ICE, adding thousands more beds able to hold arrested immigrants who are awaiting deportation hearings.
The Scripps News ICE Inc. series of investigative reports has uncovered complaints about inadequate medical care, understaffing, and overcrowding at some for-profit detention centers. Two cases of measles were reported at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, owned and operated by CoreCivic. During their earnings calls, company leaders did not address reports of problems at their lockups but said they take seriously the wellbeing of those in their care.
CoreCivic and The GEO Group see room to grow in 2026 by bringing more idled detention centers online and by possibly converting warehouses owned by ICE into more facilities able to hold migrants. A record 70,000 immigrants are in detention, a number the Trump Administration would like to increase to 100,000.
The Trump administration's initial statements defending violence from immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis often contradict what anyone can see with their own eyes.
Videos and court testimony, time and again, point to a pattern of government deception.
"Sickening lies" is how the parents of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti described comments the day their son was killed by Border Patrol agents after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti "brandished" his gun, even as video showed the weapon remained holstered until an agent removed it from Pretti's waist.
"This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that," Noem had said during a weekend news conference.
"This looks like a situation where an individual came to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement," she continued.
In a social media post, Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller called Pretti a "would-be assassin."
There is no evidence showing any of those statements to be true.
Scripps News asked DHS whether Noem still stands by her early comments blaming Pretti for his own death.
A DHS spokesperson, who declined to be identified, did not answer directly, but said, "The initial statement was based on reports from CBP from a very chaotic scene on the ground. That's precisely why an investigation is underway and DHS will let the facts lead the investigation."
It was not the first time that video has disputed what government officials were saying about events in Minneapolis.
Noem called Good a "domestic terrorist" who had "weaponized her vehicle."
But video shows Good turning away from the agent as the first shot was fired. The dispute over her intent and the agent's decision to kill her may never be resolved because the federal government hasn't committed to carrying out a full investigation.
And on Jan. 13, a woman driving down a street where a protest had broken out was violently dragged from her car by masked federal officers.
The official DHS version of events claimed the woman, seen on the video attempting to drive away, had ignored law enforcement demands to leave the scene and was arrested for obstruction.
According to her lawyer, and despite being accused of being a "violent agitator," the woman, Aliya Rahman, was never charged with anything.
Then on Jan. 20, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken from a running car in his driveway by ICE agents as he was coming home from preschool. DHS said his father, who ICE was trying to catch, had "abandoned the boy,"
School officials said the agents used the boy "as bait" to try to get the family to open the door of the house and refused to leave the child with another adult while they went after the father.
Vice President J.D. Vance told a different story.
"I do a little bit more follow-up research, and what I find is that the 5-year-old was not arrested, that his dad was an illegal alien, and when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran," Vance said. "Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death?"
Ramos and his father, who entered the U.S. legally to apply for asylum, were swiftly taken to an ICE holding facility in Dilley, Texas. A judge has prohibited ICE from deporting them.
Liam's mother has said her son appears to be sick from the food there.
Democrats are demanding that both the father and his son be released so they can pursue their asylum claim.
All these cases raise a central question. If the government has been shown to be deceptive after incidents where there is plenty of visual evidence and multiple eyewitness accounts, as with the killings of Good and Pretti, why should the American people believe their statements on matters that are murkier?
The Trump administration has offered open-ended contracts to 13 private companies for help verifying where suspected undocumented immigrants live and work.
A Scripps News investigation found that some of the companies have no record of previously doing business with the government. Some also list post office boxes or residences as their main office addresses, raising questions about their qualifications to handle sensitive personal data and to conduct in-person surveillance of migrants.
Just before Christmas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded contracts potentially worth a combined $1.2 billion for the companies to provide "skip tracing services nationwide" during the next two years, according to federal contracting records reviewed by the Scripps News investigative team. The records show that most of the companies have not yet received any payments.
The Department of Homeland Security published a document in October saying ICE had an immediate need for skip tracing, a process described as using government data, the web, and physical surveillance to confirm the location of targeted immigrants.
The companies would be expected to send ICE a collection of photos and documents confirming the person's residence and/or place of employment.
The contractors also may be asked to deliver official government documents to persons of interest, the document states. There is the possibility of monetary bonuses. The more undocumented immigrants they find, the more money the businesses can make.
The companies are essentially ICE bounty hunters, said Sharon Bradford Franklin, former chairwoman of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
"It's the same kind of incentive situation," Bradford Franklin said.
Some of the awarded contractors are linked to large corporations, like a company run by the GEO Group, which operates private ICE detention centers for the government.
Other grant recipients are much smaller companies, still able to make millions of dollars from the contract.
A business named Fraud Inc. is run out of an apartment in Conroe, Texas. Reached by phone, the company's president said he runs the business from home. He said that his aim is to find as many undocumented immigrants as possible to take advantage of the bonuses offered by the government.
Fraud Inc. could earn more than $25 million, according to contracting records.
Gravitas Professional Services LLC is an Ohio company that lists a post office box as its main address.
YouTube videos show Gravitas had been focused on much smaller jobs, including tracking down a client's biological father and catching people allegedly committing workers' compensation fraud.
"Gravitas is mostly in the insurance world but we've been known to locate people through infidelity and corporate investigations," owner Adam Visnic says in one video posted to YouTube.
The business could earn over $32 million searching for immigrants.
A.I. Solutions 87 is an LLC with an address of a single-family home in Wisconsin. The LLC could make more than $48 million dollars through its contract.
ICE did not respond to Scripps News' questions about how the agency picked the entities that won contracts.
The companies are required to follow federal, state and local laws, but because the contracts themselves aren't public, there are no published details about rules to protect government data and civil rights.
"When the government outsources this type of surveillance, it increases the risk of abuse," Bradford Franklin said. "There is even less ability to have oversight. There are rules that simply don't apply."
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