ICE is using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more detention beds

ICE is using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more detention beds
ICE's moves have delighted industry analysts on company earnings calls and promised bigger profits but have also drawn criticism. Skeptical city officials argue CoreCivic needs a special use permit. (AP)
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Updated 16 June 2025
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ICE is using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more detention beds

ICE is using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more detention beds
  • No-bid contracts with politically connected companies have become crucial to the Republican Trump administration’s push for more space to hold immigrants for deportation
  • ICE’s moves have delighted industry analysts on company earnings calls and promised bigger profits but have also drawn criticism. Skeptical city officials argue CoreCivic needs a special use permit

LEAVENWORTH: Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”
Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the US illegally.
The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.
ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.
That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as “a hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.
To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for “immigration enforcement support teams” to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints or telling ICE if someone is a risk to community safety.
Just last week , Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants — and earn $66 million in annual revenue.
“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders.
A tax-cutting and budget reconciliation measure approved last month by the House includes $45 billion over four years for immigrant detention, a threefold spending increase. The Senate is now considering that legislation.
Declaring an emergency to expedite contracts
When Trump started his second term in January, CoreCivic and Geo had around 20 idle facilities, partly because of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the Trump administration wants to more than double the existing 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and — if private prison executives’ predictions are accurate — possibly to more than 150,000.
ICE declared a national emergency on the US border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without “Full and Open Competition.”
Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE’s document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan.
The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn’t been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical.
Charles Tiefer, a contract expert and professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, said letter contracts normally are reserved for minor matters, not the big changes he sees ICE making to previous agreements.
“I think that a letter contract is a pathetic way to make big important contracts,” he said.
A Kansas prison town becomes a priority
CoreCivic’s Leavenworth facility quickly became a priority for ICE and the company because of its central location. Leavenworth, with 37,000 residents, is only 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the west of the Kansas City International Airport. The facility would hold men and women and is within ICE’s area of operations for Chicago, 420 miles (676 kilometers) to the northeast.
“That would mean that people targeted in the Chicago area and in Illinois would end up going to this facility down in Kansas,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Prisons have long been an important part of Leavenworth’s economy, employing hundreds of workers to guard prisoners held in two military facilities, the nation’s first federal penitentiary, a Kansas correctional facility and a county jail within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of city hall.
Resistance from Trump country
The Leavenworth area’s politics might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president.
But skeptical city officials argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn’t because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge last week issued an order requiring it.
An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the US Marshals Service.
In late 2021, CoreCivic stopped housing pretrial detainees in its Leavenworth facility after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the US Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. In the months before the closure, the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were “false and defamatory.”
Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23 percent, according to a Department of Justice report from 2017.
“It was just mayhem,” recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. He said repeated assaults sent him to the emergency room three times, including once after a blow to the head that required 14 staples.
The critics have included a federal judge
When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from US District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: “The only way I could describe it frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole.”
The city’s lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force’s ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes.
The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. One unit for inmates had a painting on one wall featuring a covered wagon.
During the tour, when asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees’ experiences and said the company officials “do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.”
ICE moves quickly across the US

Besides CoreCivic’s Leavenworth prison, other once-shuttered facilities could come online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, to help Trump fulfill his deportation plans.
ICE wants to reopen existing facilities because it’s faster than building new ones, said Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director for the Detention Watch Network, which has organized nationwide protests against ICE detention.
Counties often lease out jail space for immigrant detention, but ICE said some jurisdictions have passed ordinances barring that.
ICE has used contract modifications to reopen shuttered lockups like the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey, and a 2,500-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, offering no explanations why new, competitively bid contracts weren’t sought.
The Newark facility, with its own history of problems, resumed intakes May 1, and disorder broke out at the facility Thursday night. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who previously was arrested there and accused of trespassing, cited reports of a possible uprising, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed four escapes.
The contract modification for Dilley, which was built to hold families and resumed operations in March, calls its units “neighborhoods” and gives them names like Brown Bear and Blue Butterfly.
The financial details for the Newark and Dilley contract modifications are blacked out in online copies, as they for more than 50 other agreements ICE has signed since Trump took office. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.
From idle prisons to a ‘gold rush’
Private prison executives are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in new ICE profits. Since Trump’s reelection in November, CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56 percent and Geo’s by 73 percent.
“It’s the gold rush,” Michael A. Hallett, a professor of criminal justice at the University of North Florida who studies private prisons. “All of a sudden, demand is spiraling. And when you’re the only provider that can meet demand, you can pretty much set your terms.”
Geo’s former lobbyist Pam Bondi is now the US attorney general. It anticipates that all of its idle prisons will be activated this year, its executive chairman, George Zoley, told shareholders.
CoreCivic, which along with Geo donated millions of dollars to largely GOP candidates at all levels of government and national political groups, is equally optimistic. It began daily talks with the Trump administration immediately after the election in November, said Hininger.
CoreCivic officials said ICE’s letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing.
Tiefer, who served on an independent commission established to study government contracting for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said ICE is “placing a very dicey long-term bet” because of its past problems and said ICE is giving CoreCivic “the keys to the treasury” without competition.
But financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, “Great news.”
“Are you hiding any more of them on us?” he asked.


Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power

Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power
Updated 58 min 4 sec ago
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Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power

Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power
  • Museveni first took power as head of a rebel force in 1986, he has been elected six times, though recent elections have been marred by violence and allegations of vote rigging

KAMPALA: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Saturday sought nomination for a seventh term, a move that would bring him closer to five decades in power.
Museveni, 80, has defied calls for his retirement, as critics warn that he as veered into authoritarianism with virtually no opposition even within his ruling National Resistance Movement party.
He was welcomed by a large crowd of supporters as he went to collect nomination papers from the offices of the ruling party in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Museveni first took power as head of a rebel force in 1986. He has since been elected six times, though recent elections have been marred by violence and allegations of vote rigging. His main opponent in the last election was the popular entertainer known as Bobi Wine, who has also declared his candidacy in the polls set for January 2026.
Wine, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has seen many associates jailed or go into hiding as security forces cracked down on opposition supporters.
Museveni has dismissed Wine as “an agent of foreign interests” who cannot be trusted with power. Wine has been arrested many times on various charges but has never been convicted. He insists he is running a nonviolent campaign.
Decades ago, Museveni himself had criticized African leaders who overstayed their welcome in office. In Uganda, lawmakers did the same thing for him when they jettisoned the last constitutional obstacle — age limits — for a possible life presidency. His son, army chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has asserted his wish to succeed his father, raising fears of hereditary rule.
A long-time opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, has been jailed since November over alleged treason charges his lawyers say are politically motivated. Besigye, a physician who retired from Uganda’s military at the rank of colonel, is a former president of the Forum for Democratic Change party, for many years Uganda’s most prominent opposition group.
The East African country has never seen a peaceful transfer of power since independence from Britain in 1962.


Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election

Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election
Updated 28 June 2025
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Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election

Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election
  • Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed

BELGRADE: Belgrade is bracing for yet another student-led protest on Saturday to pressure Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic to call for a snap parliamentary election after nearly eight months of rallies that have rattled his firm grip on power in the Balkan country.
Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed, killing 16 people on Nov. 1.
Many blamed the concrete roof crash on rampant government corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects, leading to recurring mass protests.
Vucic and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have refused the demand for an early vote and accused protesters of planning to spur violence at orders from abroad, which they didn’t specify.
In a show of business as usual, the Serbian president handed out presidential awards in the capital to people, including artists and journalists, he deemed worthy, as his loyalists, camping in a park in central Belgrade, announced they would hold a “literary evening.”
“People need not worry — the state will be defended and thugs brought to justice,” Vucic told reporters on Saturday.
Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections are due in 2027.
Saturday marks St. Vitus Day, a religious holiday and the date when Serbs mark a 14th-century battle against Ottoman Turks in Kosovo that was the start of hundreds of years of Turkish rule, holding symbolic importance.
Police earlier this week arrested several people accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government and banned entry into the country to several people from Croatia and a theater director from Montenegro without explanation. Serbia’s railway company halted train service over an alleged bomb threat in what critics said was an apparent bid to prevent people from traveling to Belgrade for the rally.
Authorities made similar moves back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest in the Balkan country, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
Vucic’s loyalists then set up a camp in a park outside his office, which still stands. The otherwise peaceful gathering on March 15 came to an abrupt end when part of the crowd suddenly scattered in panic, triggering allegations that authorities used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters, which they have denied.
Vucic, a former extreme nationalist, has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago. Though he formally says he wants Serbia to join the European Union, critics say Vucic has stifled democratic freedoms as he strengthened ties with Russia and China.


What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling

What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling
Updated 28 June 2025
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What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling

What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling
  • US President Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily

WASHINGTON: The legal battle over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite the Republican administration’s major victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.
Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with more than a century of precedent.
The high court’s ruling sends cases challenging the president’s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of the president’s policy remains uncertain.
Here’s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s ruling and what happens next.
What does birthright citizenship mean?
Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.
The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in part to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” the amendment states.
Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the US to Chinese parents, was refused re-entry into the US after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the US, no matter their parents’ legal status.
It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of US law, with only a handful of exceptions, such as for children born in the US to foreign diplomats.
Trump has long said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship
Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily. It’s part of the hard-line immigration agenda of the president, who has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – saying it means the US can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.
A series of federal judges have said that’s not true, and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” US District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing earlier this year in his Seattle courtroom.
In Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington suburb, US District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that “the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed” Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Is Trump’s order constitutional? The justices didn’t say
The high court’s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge’s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued want to usurp the president’s authority with rulings blocking his priorities around immigration and other matters.
But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump’s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order.
“The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges’ decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is “very confident” that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.
Questions and uncertainty swirl around next steps
The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.
The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump’s order.
But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor.
“It’s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,” said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court’s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to “act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court’s prompt review” in cases “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.”
Opponents of Trump’s order warned there would be a patchwork of polices across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief.
“Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. “By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.”


A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says

A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says
Updated 55 min 33 sec ago
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A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says

A Russian drone strike on Odesa kills a married couple and injures 17 people, Ukraine says
  • A drone slammed into a residential tower block in the city, causing damage to three floors and trapping residents, emergency services said
  • The two killed in the attack were a married couple

KYIV: Russian drones struck the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa overnight, killing two people and injuring at least 17, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday.

A drone slammed into a residential tower block in the city, causing damage to three floors and trapping residents, emergency services said. The two killed in the attack were a married couple, according to regional Gov. Oleh Kiper, who added that three children were among the injured.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, over 40 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight and on Saturday morning over western Russia and Kremlin-occupied Crimea.

Long-range drone strikes have been a hallmark of the war, now in its fourth year. The race by both sides to develop increasingly sophisticated and deadlier drones has turned the war into a testing ground for new weaponry.

Ukrainian drones have pulled off some stunning feats. At the start of June, nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet was destroyed or damaged in a covert Ukrainian operation using cheaply made drones sneaked into Russian territory.

Smaller, short-range drones are used by both sides on the battlefield and in areas close to the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published Thursday that short-range drone attacks killed at least 395 civilians and injured 2,635 between the start of the war in February 2022 and April 2025. Almost 90 percent of the attacks were by the Russian armed forces, it reported.

More than 13,300 civilians have died and over 34,700 have been injured in the war, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said a June 11 report.


Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms

Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms
Updated 28 June 2025
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Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms

Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms
  • Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment

MARSEILLES: Sweating Europeans braced on Saturday for the first heatwave of the northern hemisphere summer, as climate change pushes the world’s fastest-warming continent’s thermometers increasingly into the red.
Temperatures are set to rise to 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) in Rome, driving the Eternal City’s many tourists and Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican alike toward the Italian capital’s some 2,500 public fountains for refreshment.
With residents of the southern port city of Marseille expected to have to cope with temperatures flirting with 40C (104F), authorities in France’s second-largest city ordered public swimming pools to be made free of charge to help residents beat the Mediterranean heat.
Two-thirds of Portugal will be on high alert on Sunday for extreme heat and forest fires with 42C (108F) expected in the capital Lisbon, while visitors to — and protesters against — Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Friday wedding in Venice likewise sweltered under the summer sun.
“I try not to think about it, but I drink a lot of water and never stay still, because that’s when you get sunstroke,” Sriane Mina, an Italian student, told AFPTV on Friday in Venice.
Meanwhile Spain, which has in past years seen a series of deadly summer blazes ravaging the Iberian peninsula, is expecting peak temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) across most of the country from Sunday.
Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment, with Europe’s ever-hotter and increasingly common blistering summer heatwaves a direct result of that warming.
With peaks of 39C (102F) expected in Naples and Palermo, Sicily has ordered a ban on outdoor work in the hottest hours of the day, as has the Liguria region in northern Italy.
The country’s trade unions are campaigning to extend the measure to other parts of the country.
The heatwave comes hot on the heels of a series of tumbling records for extreme heat, including Europe’s hottest March ever, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitor.
As a result of the planet’s warming, extreme weather events including hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves like this weekend’s have become more frequent and intense, scientists warn.
By some estimates 2024, the hottest year in recorded history so far, saw worldwide disasters which cost more than $300 billion.