President-elect Donald TrumpThe promise to impose a mass deportation of immigrants excites private prison executives, who in phone calls Thursday salivated over the “unprecedented opportunity” a second Trump presidency would bring for their profits.

Mass deportations would tear apart families and shatter the lives of millions of people who may have spent years or even decades establishing themselves, their families and communities in the country, critics warn. Trump defined much of his campaign by asserting, dehumanizing and racist termsthat evicting them would improve the economy and reduce crime. Political experts said that it would hurt businesses that rely on their workforce, cause inflation to spike, and do almost nothing to fight crime because undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the average American.

Trump advisers are openly discussing building mass expulsion camps along the southern border, where tens of thousands of people will be detained while judges process their cases. While Democratic presidents have extended In the face of the incarceration and deportation complex of the past two decades, Trump’s first-term record and second-term proposals represent a massive and unprecedented escalation. Private prison executives believe that whatever the effect of deportations on the rest of American society and the economy, they will at least make a lot of money from it.

The first hint of their impending good fortune came as Trump was expected to win the presidential election; as the news arrived, their stock prices skyrocketed. “A HUGE winner from Trump’s victory: private prison companies GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc.” observed Steven Dennis of Bloomberg News on Wednesday. “Their stocks, which could benefit from Trump’s plans to round up millions of immigrants, today soared 41% and 29%, respectively.”

As Thomson Reuters Foundation reporter Avi Asher-Schapiro pointed out, incarceration giant Geo Group already has more than $1 billion in ICE contracts to run existing immigration detention centers and a GPS monitoring system of 175,000 migrants. If the House GOP’s immigration bill passes, he wrote, that number of people under surveillance could reach 7 million.

Private prison leaders did not wait passively for their “unprecedented opportunity” to present itself. Instead, companies like Geo Group have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-Trump Super PACs, as well as the $5,000 maximum donation to his official campaign and donations to other Republican candidates for the House and Senate. Trump, in return for their long-standing support, not only pursued the type of policies that would bring windfall profits to private prisons, but he also reversed former President Barack Obama’s efforts to phase out private prisons from the process.

In earnings calls Thursday, leaders celebrated the prospect of a “much more aggressive” policy framework from the new Trump administration, and with it, increased government funding of private contracts for mass detention, electronic tracking devices and transportation of detainees within the United States. States and to other countries. “The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in the history of our company: of the country the story and the opportunity it will bring,” George Zoley, company founder and executive chairman said during a callassuring participants of his company’s “ability to rapidly expand” its services and the potential influx of $25 million in revenue from air travel alone.

“It seems like with this election this year, we’re heading into an era that we haven’t really seen, maybe only once or twice in corporate history, where the industry value proposition private, both for our state partners and for our Federal partners will not only be strong today, but even stronger in the coming years,” said Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, crowded to its own shareholders.

Although Zoley and Hininger will be handsomely compensated for their work, such an effort could potentially cost the federal government and its taxpayers. up to $88 billion one year. However, in a series of post-election press calls, Trump appeared unconcerned. “It’s not about the price. It’s not really the case, we have no choice. When people killed and murdered, when drug lords destroyed countries, and now they are going to go back to these countries because they’re not staying here. There’s no price,” he said. told NBC News.

Despite all the influx of federal money and other benefits, private prisons are known for providing substandard care to the people in their custody. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that inadequate medical care contributed to half of the deaths in their facilities; another from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that private prisons failed to meet standards for in-custody health care, failed to protect LGBTQ people from abuse, failed to meet standards to prevent and respond to sexual assault, provide access to legal services or to provide sufficient nutritious food, especially compared to public prisons.

The reported negligence occurred with ICE’s knowledge, but according to a 2014 report According to the Government Accountability Office, the agency often ignores the fact that at least 125 facilities have been operating under outdated standards since 2000 or waives certain standards for contractors at its discretion. Under the current quota modelprivate prisons are forced to fill as many beds as possible with inmates – there is virtually no financial incentive to make the quality of their stay more tolerable.

The extent to which ICE can expand its contracts under Trump will depend heavily on the amount of funding Congress authorizes for the project; while the GOP is expected to take control of the Senate, the House appears less secure. But the president-elect can implement much of his plans by executive order, and private prison leaders appear confident in their man to make it happen.