Compared to its most recent notice in November, ICE was more detailed about its 2025 plans. in another notice published last year. This earlier notice indicates that ICE has been preparing for a more intense immigration policy on the horizon, regardless of who ultimately wins the election.
In the 2023 notification ICE says ISAP’s parent program, Alternatives to Detention, will be renamed Release and Reporting Management. This new program will include monitoring every single non-detainee 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 for surveillance under the new program — meaning that, if implemented, the scale of ICE’s remote surveillance would increase by roughly 3,000 percent.
According to a government contracts database, BI Incorporated has been an ICE 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 United States.
Although the stock market as a whole rose the day after Trump’s victory, GEO Group’s gain made it “the single biggest gainer in the U.S. stock market — among companies of all sizes,” according to Robinhood-owned investment news site Sherwood News . Its five-year contract to manage ISAP, worth $2.2 billion, is scheduled to expire next year.
On a post-election earnings call for GEO Group, CEO Brian Evans said the company could increase its ISAP capacity by “several hundred thousand participants and up to several million if needed,” as HuffPo reported. The company’s chief operating officer, Wayne Calabrese, added that they have already informed ICE that it is willing to do so.
“We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much broader approach to monitoring the several million individuals currently on the non-detainer immigration list,” Calabrese said on the call.
According to HuffPo, GEO Group competitor CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) held its own earnings call after the election, during which CEO Damon Hininger said the timing of ICE’s Nov. 6 notice “probably not is a coincidence’.
“We took that as a very encouraging sign,” Hininger said.
