ICE Started Ramping Up Its Surveillance Arsenal Immediately After Donald Trump Won

Compared to its recent November notice, ICE was more detailed about its 2025 plans 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 eventually won the election.

In the 2023 notice, ICE says that ISAP’s parent program, Alternatives to Detention, would be rebranded as Release and Reporting Management. This new program would involve monitoring every single non-detained person who’s awaiting a court hearing or deportation, as opposed to just some. 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 approximately 3,000 percent.

According to a government contract database, B.I. 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 US.

Though the stock market as a whole went up the day after Trump’s victory, GEO Group’s stock boost made it “the single biggest winner in the US stock market—among companies of any size,” according to Robinhood-owned investment news site Sherwood News. Its five-year contract to run ISAP, worth $2.2 billion, is scheduled to expire next year.

On a post-election earnings call for GEO Group, CEO Brian Evans said that the company could increase its ISAP capacity by “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary,” as reported by HuffPo. The company’s COO, Wayne Calabrese, added that they have already informed ICE that it’s ready to do this.

“We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more expansive approach to monitoring the several millions of individuals who are currently on the non-detained immigrant docket,” Calabrese said on the call.

According to HuffPo, GEO Group competitor CoreCivic (previously called Corrections Corporation of America) had its own post-election earnings call, during which CEO Damon Hininger said that the timing of the November 6 ICE notice was “probably not a coincidence.”

“We took that as a very encouraging sign,” Hininger said.