With ICE crackdowns on the rise, private prisons are booming businesses

Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transported—sometimes thousands of miles across the country—to large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast.