How much do private detention contractors and local jurisdictions receive annually from ICE contracts and grants?
Executive summary
The recent federal budget dramatically expanded ICE’s detention and enforcement funding, producing roughly $15 billion per year available for immigration detention through 2029 and a headline $45 billion pot intended for building and operating new detention capacity that will largely flow through contractor per-diem payments [1] [2]. Private prison firms — principally CoreCivic and GEO Group — and their subcontractor ecosystems are positioned to capture the lion’s share of that flow, while local jurisdictions receive much smaller, per-diem-style payments that can range from pennies to a few dollars per detainee per day [3] [4] [5].
1. How much money has Congress put on the table and how does ICE report annual capacity funding?
Congress approved sweeping appropriations that include $45 billion designated for expanding ICE detention capacity to be spent through fiscal year 2029, and advocacy and reporting note that, combined with ICE’s annual appropriations, the agency will have nearly $15 billion a year to spend on detention over that period [1] [6]. Analysts who parsed the reconciliation bill describe the $45 billion as an expansion of detention budgets that translates to an increase in ICE’s operational detention funding — in one characterization adding $11.25 billion to ICE’s annual detention budget, a roughly 400% boost compared with the prior baseline [2].
2. Who are the main private beneficiaries and what scale of revenue do they stand to gain?
Private detention operators, chiefly CoreCivic and GEO Group, already manage the majority of ICE beds and are the primary intended recipients of per-diem and facility-construction contracts tied to expanded capacity; reporting repeatedly identifies those two companies as likely to gain the most from the inflows [3] [7] [8]. Industry-level numbers and contract terms inform the revenue picture: ICE historically pays roughly $165 per detainee per day for detention costs in many contracts, and GEO’s transportation arm alone forecasted potential annual revenue increases in the tens of millions tied to escalated deportation flights, indicating private firms can convert increased utilization into sizable recurring cash flows [7]. Independent watchdogs and reporting emphasize that nearly 80–90 percent of people in ICE custody are already held in for-profit facilities, meaning most of the new per-diem dollars are likely to route through private operators [9] [4].
3. What do local counties and municipal jurisdictions receive, and how much can that add up to?
Local governments that host ICE facilities typically participate through Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSAs) or similar arrangements and receive comparatively modest per-detainee payments — examples in federal reporting show IGSA-holder compensation as low as $0.50 to $3.50 per detainee per day, which annualized was estimated in a GAO example to amount to roughly $84,000 to $438,000 per year for some arrangements [5]. Local officials and county administrators in affected places report getting portions of ICE’s per-diem payments under public‑private partnerships, and while those sums can be meaningful to small rural budgets, they are a small fraction of the total dollars flowing into detention [7] [4].
4. Why the headline totals don’t map neatly to single-company windfalls, and where oversight gaps matter
The $45 billion headline will be distributed across a layered procurement ecosystem — bed per-diems, construction and reactivation contracts, transportation, medical services, guards, food, and technology — so the money fragments through many contractors and subcontracts even as major firms stand to win the biggest shares; watchdogs warn that rapid spending and weakened oversight create incentives for corners to be cut and for entrenched private interests to lock in long-term revenue streams [10] [11]. Investigations and advocacy groups flag that despite large appropriations, public reporting currently does not map those dollars to a clean, auditable list of annual payments by company, contract, or locality; therefore precise annual receipts by every private contractor or jurisdiction cannot be fully quantified from the available public reporting alone [12] [11].