Businessweek | Deportation Inc.
Addicted to ICE

The sun is still beating down on the scrubby New Mexico dirt when an army-green bus pulls into the parking lot of the Torrance County Detention Facility in the small town of Estancia. Behind barred windows, the silhouettes of dozens of men are just visible. Many of them have never been to New Mexico before. It’s March, and New Mexico is cooler, drier, browner than Florida, where they were this morning before being forced onto a plane, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and flown here.

They’re in New Mexico because US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running out of space. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s promise to pursue the biggest immigration crackdown in US history, men such as the ones on this bus are being targeted by ICE and local law enforcement in unprecedented ways. The detention facilities closer to home are overflowing. So ICE brings them here, to an ICE town.

John, who’s from the Tampa area, sits on the other side of those bars, watching the bus crawl closer to the sand-colored detention compound jutting out of the flat earth. His vision isn’t good right now; someone fell on him and broke his glasses while he was sleeping on the floor at an ICE facility in Miami. John, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation for talking to the press, was picked up at a regular check-in for a special program typically reserved for first-time offenders of nonviolent crimes. Now he’s almost 2,000 miles from home, from his grandmother, from his two dogs. He knew it was a bad sign when he overheard ICE officers talking about his impending transfer, but he didn’t know where he was going until the plane was ready for takeoff.

Over the next few weeks, John will spend sleepless nights shivering in his cell. He’ll join an impromptu Bible study with other guys in his unit and watch the younger ones share their coats with older men during recreation time. He’ll eat in a room with a floor covered in feces. He’ll ask, many times, for supplies to clean it up. He’ll see a nurse for his back and his vision and his climbing blood pressure. He’ll receive nothing but Tylenol. He’ll participate in a hunger strike. He’ll watch men drink water out of a trash can brought in when the facility’s water is shut off. And he’ll gradually start to long to be deported to El Salvador, a country he barely knows, where he hasn’t lived since he was a child. He’ll want this but won’t get it, because this is an ICE jail with hardly any ICE officers.

Maybe things could have been different. While John’s plane sat on the tarmac at the Miami airport, Linda Jaramillo sat in a jailhouse turned government building in Estancia, the county seat, discussing the private detention center that would soon detain him. Torrance County’s more than $2 million-a-month contract with ICE was set to expire unless Jaramillo and her two fellow county commissioners voted to extend it.

Immigration lawyers and advocates were there to beg them not to. The Torrance County Detention Facility is one of the system’s most troubled, they argued. It has a long history of failures that at one point led a federal watchdog to demand an immediate evacuation, something ICE declined to do after disputing the findings. At the meeting, an activist read testimony from a man detained at the facility who said he had to wait almost four hours for an ambulance to take him to get treatment for a third-degree burn he got while working in the kitchen to make money to call his family. “Please, truly, we need help from people outside,” the advocate read. “We’re human beings. Please. We’re not prisoners, we’re not animals. We’re human beings. I urge you to not extend the contract.”

No one spoke in favor of extending the county’s ICE agreement. No one had to. Since signing the contract six years ago, the Torrance County Commission has voted to approve regular extensions without much hand-wringing over its role in US immigration policy.

Jaramillo is the newest commissioner, the only woman and the only Spanish speaker. A Republican, she came to her current job with a quarter century of experience as the county clerk under her belt, but serving as commissioner is different—she has more power now, she says. On that day she pledged to use her authority to visit the facility, to see for herself what it was really like inside. And then she voted to extend the ICE contract.

This is an ICE town, after all: a community convinced that its financial survival depends on locking people up. It’s not a new phenomenon. In this iteration of the classic prison town, though, many of the people behind bars haven’t been convicted of crimes. Estancia’s economic engine is fueled by a growing supply of immigrants in ICE custody. These aren’t people who’ve recently entered the US; border crossings have slowed dramatically. In a lot of cases, the people detained in Torrance County had been living in the US for years when they were picked up in the raids sweeping the country as Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations.

Trump needs these towns, and he needs local officials who are willing—and sometimes eager—to sign deals that keep private detention facilities open no matter the conditions inside. The Trump administration has sought to remove the discretion used by prior administrations to release detained people before immigration hearings, prompting a rush for detention space that could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Already, some 30 new counties have started using their jails for immigration detention via arrangements with the federal government. And if the administration has its way, the government will soon be doling out as much as $45 billion more in detention contracts.

Torrance County gets paid by ICE to detain immigrants, but it doesn’t keep the money. That flows to CoreCivic Inc., a behemoth in the private prison industry and the owner and operator of the detention facility. As much as Estancia is an ICE town, it’s a CoreCivic town too. The company provides jobs—about 93 of them in a county with a population of about 16,000—and a lot of tax revenue, plus beds the county can use, for a price, to hold locals.

Across its two ICE detention facilities in New Mexico, CoreCivic provides more than 300 jobs, with most staff living near or within the counties, a company spokesperson said in an email. The company pays more than $40 million annually in impact fees, salaries and benefits, utilities and tax revenue, he said. CoreCivic doesn’t enforce immigration laws and has no say over whether someone is deported, released or transferred, Brian Todd, the spokesperson, wrote in an email. “CoreCivic is committed to providing safe, humane and appropriate care for the people in our facilities,” he said. “Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to.”

Jaramillo, like pretty much everyone else here, knows a lot of the people who work for CoreCivic. Her brother spent 20 years as a guard at the detention facility. And CoreCivic is always hiring; a sign along the main drag in Estancia advertises a wage of $22.50 an hour and openings for detention officers and “medical/essential staff.”

“So that’s my dilemma,” Jaramillo says. “I don’t want it to close down, because it’s a great place for people to work there. But I don’t want anybody to be treated cruelly.” Then again, she adds, “I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

But drought decimated local farms in the 1930s. Crops died, and property values plunged. By the 1970s, Estancia had been dealt another blow, this one human-made. Interstate 40 was built just north of town, and all the travelers and business the town had come to depend on started going elsewhere.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of the Pixar movie Cars, which Estancia’s mayor, Nathan Dial, likes to say is more documentary than fiction. In the movie the town is revitalized when Lightning McQueen, the lead anthropomorphized car, moves his racing headquarters to the area.

Estancia has a different savior. CoreCivic was founded as Corrections Corp. of America (CCA) in 1983 by Terrell Don Hutto, Doctor Robert Crants and Tom Beasley. Hutto headed up corrections for the state of Arkansas, Crants was a real estate executive, and Beasley was the chief of the Tennessee Republican Party. The goal was efficiency: Costs would be low, returns high. “You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers,” Beasley said in a 1988 article in Inc. magazine.

They had something else going for them: demand. Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs had created a surge in criminal cases. Then Congress passed the Bail Reform Act of 1984, massively expanding pretrial detention by allowing judges to cite community safety when denying bail. CCA and others in this nascent industry saw an opportunity in New Mexico. Land was cheap, and state politicians were eager. “At the rate that the federal government needs jail space, we will have plenty of prisoners to fill up all available jail space,” a chief deputy for the US Marshals Service told the Albuquerque Journal in 1990. In November of that year, CCA opened the Torrance County Detention Facility on a patch of then-unincorporated land outside Estancia. News reports put the cost at about $7 million.

From 1985 to 1997 the US jail population doubled, and the number of people detained in private facilities worldwide jumped from 3,100 to more than 132,000, the vast majority in the US. CCA captured a chunk of that growth, and New Mexico was at the heart of it. By 2016 the state led the nation in the percentage of its people held by private prison companies.

But those trends were starting to change. The Obama administration revised sentencing guidelines for low-level drug offenses. A 2016 Department of Justice memo went a step further, ordering the federal Bureau of Prisons not to renew its contracts with private prison companies. That October, CCA changed its name to CoreCivic, part of a pivot the company said it was making toward the “real estate solutions business.”

The first signs that CoreCivic’s business in New Mexico was hurting came in Cibola County, about a two-hour drive west of Estancia, at a correctional facility the company had acquired in the late 1990s. Cibola had also fallen on hard times: The mines that had fueled its economy closed, and people moved out. This prison, as well as a couple of others scattered across the county, became an economic driver.

But in 2016, CoreCivic lost its contract with the Bureau of Prisons for the Cibola facility. Under the direction of then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the bureau had begun reducing its reliance on private prisons, with the goal of eliminating such contracts altogether. Cibola, where Bureau of Prisons monitors had documented poor medical care and an investigative report by The Nation detailed missteps relating to a series of deaths, was an obvious target. At the Torrance facility, the number of people in federal custody dropped so much that, in August 2017, CoreCivic told its investors it was idling the detention center. Three months after it closed, Torrance County sought emergency funding from the state government.

If CoreCivic was the lifeline for these rural counties, ICE was CoreCivic’s. In May 2019, ICE reached a deal with Torrance County that solved the company’s problems there. ICE promised to pay for 714 beds every month, whether or not they were filled. CoreCivic had, in effect, guaranteed revenue for a facility in the middle of nowhere. The Torrance County Detention Facility reopened its doors.

But what do you do when a town is already hooked? In New Mexico, local officials point to their counties’ economic realities as proof they need these contracts and they need CoreCivic. “They are better at this than we are,” says Kate Fletcher, Cibola’s county manager. For years, the county spent some $5 million annually to detain people at a nearby jail, she says. In late 2016, CoreCivic cut a deal with ICE providing detention services for as many as 1,116 people at the Cibola facility. The next year, CoreCivic began managing the county’s inmates, cutting the government’s cost significantly. Plus, the county gets a small administrative fee for its role as a middleman.

Cibola also hosts a second CoreCivic prison and a state-run detention facility. By rural standards, the area is bustling, and Fletcher says the prisons keep families rooted there. The county is considering selling its closed jail to CoreCivic or the state of New Mexico, she says. That would reopen a fourth facility for detention in Cibola County.

In Estancia, CoreCivic provides the bulk of the city’s tax revenue. In lieu of a sales tax, New Mexico has something called a gross receipts tax, which charges the seller of goods rather than the buyer. In 2024, 60% of the gross receipts taxes in Estancia were filed under a code for correctional institutions, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek review of state tax data.

For CoreCivic it’s the guaranteed monthly revenue, passed to it through the county, that makes the ICE contract so valuable. In turn the company must meet certain requirements, including maintaining enough staff to keep the facility running smoothly. If it doesn’t, ICE can issue a contract discrepancy report that carries a financial penalty. The last time ICE issued a contract discrepancy report for understaffing was March 2022. CoreCivic’s guaranteed monthly pay for the facility was docked 25%, and ICE lowered the minimum beds the agency promised to pay for from 714 to 505.

Over time the rate ICE paid for each bed crept up. Last October it started paying $2.3 million a month for 505 beds, over $100,000 more than it paid for 714 beds before the company was penalized. When the ICE population exceeds 505, CoreCivic is paid more.

Despite CoreCivic’s prominence as a local employer, a big portion of the facility’s staff comes from out of town. Many of them are temporary workers, flown in from Houston or elsewhere and put up in local hotels. That was particularly true before a scheduled inspection, according to Michael Sedgwick, who was the assistant warden at the Torrance County Detention Facility from 2020 to 2022. (Before that he held the same role at Cibola.) “We needed people,” Sedgwick says. “We just didn’t have them. We always needed officers, and we always needed nurses.”

Ask around, and locals will explain why. ICE requires that all detention staff pass a criminal history and credit check. “If you have a small, local community that has no money, they’re not going to have good credit,” says Dial, the Estancia mayor. The company has tried to adapt to these circumstances by hiring kids straight out of high school.

Dial is in his 50s, carries a Ruger SP101 revolver on his hip and drives a blue Subaru Outback stuffed with old American flags people give him to retire for them. He’s an Army vet who did a tour in Afghanistan and calls himself “a red mayor in a red county in a blue state.”

At the March county commission meeting, he’d listened as Sophia Genovese, an immigration lawyer with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, told the county commission that the detention facility is currently holding a group of Afghan men who’d been abandoned in the US’s sudden and messy withdrawal. “These men who saved US and Afghan lives were left behind in the evacuation effort, knowing full well that they’d be killed if they stayed in Afghanistan,” Genovese said during her plea for commissioners to vote against extending the ICE contract. “These brave men fled to the United States thinking they’d be welcomed. Instead these men have been detained. And what’s maddening is that their detention is not required under the law.”

Dial says he hadn’t heard there were Afghans at the detention facility, but he’s not surprised. That’s how war is, he says. “It’s nothing personal.” Dial has been an ardent supporter of the ICE contract. He says he’s toured the facility as mayor and didn’t find any major problems. “Of all the things the government should be running, it should be prisons,” he says. “That’s my personal opinion. But as mayor, I understand it’s the lifeblood of the town.”

ICE largely sided with CoreCivic and balked at the report. The agency said an inspector had “acted unprofessionally” when they stated “there’s no way detainees should be housed here.” ICE also rejected the inspector general’s staffing figures, arguing that CoreCivic was in compliance with its contract.

In the summer of 2022, Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian man in ICE custody at the Torrance County Detention Facility, died after hanging himself from a shelf with a bedsheet. In a report published by ICE after his death, the agency’s external reviews and analysis unit said it had found that eight staff members lacked documentation proving they’d completed required training, though the agency said this shouldn’t be “construed as contributory” to Vial’s death. The company said in a statement that it was “deeply saddened” by his death. A month after the death, the inspector general released a full report with several recommendations regarding staffing and other concerns. ICE and CoreCivic agreed to many of them.

In February of this year, a group of whistleblowers who worked at the facility sent a letter to Congress accusing CoreCivic of regularly falsifying documents to cover up chronic understaffing. The letter urged Congress to investigate what it called “likely fraud” and “abusive conditions.” In response to the letter, CoreCivic said it “vehemently” denied the allegations and that it had “no evidence that would support that our staff at the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) falsified documents or colluded with inspectors during any federal inspection.”

Sedgwick, the former assistant warden, and three other former CoreCivic employees in New Mexico say they raised repeated concerns about staffing shortages to management. They also say they were forced to do jobs for which they’d received little to no training. “I wouldn’t want my family members at that facility,” says one employee who left the company in December and asked not to be named for fear of retribution. “I thought I could be the change. That wasn’t the case.”

In response to questions from Businessweek, CoreCivic pointed to recent audits by the ICE Office of Detention Oversight, which gave the Torrance County Detention Facility and the Cibola County Correctional Center overall “good” ratings in the 2024 fiscal year, and “superior” ratings in the 2025 fiscal year.

Under Trump, detention oversight is being rolled back. In February border czar Tom Homan said the administration was working to reduce federal inspections of local jails and prisons that hold people for ICE. The Department of Homeland Security has since moved to dismantle the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, two branches that have documented past problems at the Torrance County Detention Facility.

John’s bus in late March wasn’t the first one bringing men from Florida to Torrance County. It wasn’t even the first one that week. More and more, the beds at the detention facility are being filled by men who, like John, were picked up in raids and crackdowns across the country. In Trump’s first month in office, roughly a third of the people held at New Mexico detention centers were apprehended more than 500 miles away, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. That figure was less than 13% under President Joe Biden.

By late April, the men at Torrance were dealing with a new crisis. A pump at one of Estancia’s main water wells wasn’t working, and water to the facility was being intermittently shut off, leaving CoreCivic to rely on its storage tanks.

CoreCivic “indicated that failing to meet the water needs of the facility could result in implications for the current ICE agreement,” according to notes from an April 29 meeting with local officials. The next evening, during an emergency gathering at the Estancia library, Ryan Schwebach, one of Jaramillo’s fellow county commissioners, told the crowd that CoreCivic was the town’s biggest water customer, accounting for about a fifth of Estancia’s usage. “CoreCivic is changing what they’re doing within the facility to cut back on water because they’re aware of it,” he said. “I’m very grateful that they’re here.”

On May 1, the daughter of a Honduran man detained at the facility emailed ICE and CoreCivic. “Torrance Facility water has not been working for 3 days!! My father reports the smell of feces is intolerable!” the woman, Carol Barrios, wrote. “This is a crisis!!!” Her father, who’s 66 years old and has a history of heart trouble, had been brought to New Mexico from Florida, after he was taken into custody at the Miami airport. He has an unexpired green card but left the country for seven years and returned without applying for a reentry permit. Barrios was concerned enough that she flew to New Mexico that weekend to visit him. There, she says, she found the toilets in the lobby didn’t flush, and her father said he had gone four days without a shower.

Men detained at the facility said they had been limited to two water bottles a day until CoreCivic brought in coolers with water for them to drink. Trash cans full of water were set out so the men could flush toilets, which were full of waste, they said. The smell of sewage was overwhelming. In emails, CoreCivic said there were no sewage or plumbing issues at the facility, and that water pressure fluctuations had caused some toilets to overflow “in a few rare occasions.” Showers were placed on a schedule, the company said, but were still available to everyone.

ICE, the Marshals Service and the county “have all been apprised of this situation and are aware of our contingency plans that have been established to manage this situation,” CoreCivic said. On May 8, an ICE official visited the detention facility and met with Barrios’ father. “I am taking all of the things you are reporting seriously,” Mary De Anda-Ybarra, the field office director for ICE’s office in El Paso, Texas, wrote in an email to Barrios that night. “I understand you are looking out for your father, and that is expected.”

ICE didn’t provide comment prior to publication of this story. After publication, an ICE spokeswoman said in a statement that the agency “acknowledges the concerns raised regarding the Torrance County Detention Facility, and we remain committed to addressing them in a timely and transparent manner.” She said ICE officers visit the facility at least three times a week to communicate with and provide documentation to people in detention, and that “the agency prioritizes the safety, well-being, and appropriate treatment of individuals and continuously evaluates operations to ensure compliance with established standards.”

New Mexico’s role in the new detention regime makes some people in this blue state uncomfortable. Earlier this year, while the state legislature was still in session, lawmakers debated a bill that would forbid local governments from contracting with ICE for detention space. Similar efforts had failed in the past, but advocates hoped Trump’s crackdown would spur a sense of urgency.

The bill died in committee, with the panel’s chair, Senator Joseph Cervantes, opting not to hear it. Cervantes, a Democrat, serves an area of the state that includes Otero County, where a 1,000-bed detention facility operates under a contract with ICE. Cervantes says he worried that ending county agreements with ICE risked unintended consequences: What if the federal government started sending more immigrants to states that were less kind to them, such as Texas?

There’s nothing to suggest they’d be treated any differently in New Mexico. “It doesn’t matter to the people inside that it’s a blue state,” says Zoe Bowman, a lawyer with Las Americas, an immigration advocacy group based in El Paso. “It’s really well documented how horrific the conditions are inside New Mexico detention centers.”

Absent action from the legislature, immigration advocates have turned their attention to local officials such as Jaramillo. In mid-April she made good on her promise to tour the Torrance County Detention Facility, something Schwebach, the commission chair, said he’d done in the past. She reached out to get clearance, and a couple of days later she was walking the halls alongside the warden. Jaramillo says she visited the library and the kitchen and met with a group of men while the warden waited in the doorway. The floors were clean, she says, and she didn’t notice any odor. “They did complain about the food,” she says. “We didn’t have the time to go into detail. They just said they didn’t like the food.” This was before the worst of the overflowing toilets and the concerns with the water supply.

Jaramillo has been getting emails from people in the Miami area whose loved ones were transferred to Torrance. She says they’re voicing concern about the same types of issues she’s been hearing from advocates at commission meetings. “I saw what I saw, but I hear everybody, all the others, who are emailing me,” she says.

As for how Jaramillo will vote in October, when the ICE contract is back on the agenda: “I’m torn,” she says. Even if she votes against an extension, there’d need to be another no vote to end the contract. That’s never happened. —With Catarina Saraiva, Michael Smith, Nacha Cattan, Kayla Shea, Leon Yin and Jason Kao