BREAKING🚨 Taxpayers just paid TEN TIMES the market value for ONE ICE detention center - ran by the SAME private company that spent $1.77 MILLION in lobbying and whom Trump bought stock in SIX TIMES prior to the purchase.
The Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego sold to the Department of Homeland Security for $739.2 million on July 2. CoreCivic's own securities filings put that land and those buildings at roughly $160 million. San Diego County's assessor valued it at $168 million. The California City facility in Kern County, worth an estimated $71 million, went for $732.6 million.
CoreCivic still runs both. Its expected take after taxes? About $1.1 BILLION.
On Wednesday it announced ICE had also bought its Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota and the Midwest Regional Reception Center in Kansas, and said it is in talks over "additional" sales.
California passed a law in 2024 letting local health officers make surprise inspections of these facilities. San Diego County had to sue in March after supervisors and a health inspector said they were turned away at Otay Mesa. A judge ordered CoreCivic to let them in.
Once the buildings are federal property, state and local inspectors may lose that access entirely, the way federal prisons do.
George Zoley, CEO of the GEO Group, said it out loud on a May earnings call: "As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities."
A DHS spokesperson blamed "sanctuary politicians" and said federal ownership means ICE keeps the capacity "to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens." The same spokesperson said detention "is a choice."
A 2026 California Justice Department report found detainees with chronic illnesses at Otay Mesa and California City weren't getting adequate medical care, plus hygiene lapses and overcrowding that broke ICE's own standards.
CoreCivic gave $500,000 to Trump's inaugural committee and spent $1.77 million lobbying for the bill that funded these purchases. Trump's disclosures show he bought CoreCivic stock at least six times in 2025.
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BREAKING🚨 The nonprofits representing more than 20,000 migrant children just LOST their contract. Trump handed the $150 million replacement to a 26-person Houston firm with virtually no immigration lawyers.
The firm is Burke Law Group, and until this week its own website described its specialty as advising companies on "complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters." After the award was announced, immigration was quietly added to the practice list. Its other lines of work: white-collar defense, commercial litigation, securities litigation.
The federal notice calls it a "single source cooperative agreement." That means the administration picked the firm with no competitive bidding, and offered no justification for skipping it.
Who runs it matters. Founder Marcella Burke was a Trump appointee at the EPA and the Interior Department. Founding partner Jeffrey Hall now serves as an assistant EPA administrator. Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as senior counsel. Also on the roster: Justin Shubow, the leading champion of Trump's push to force federal buildings into classical architecture.
The children on the other side of this are as young as toddlers who haven't learned to speak yet, and federal law has required the government to facilitate lawyers for them for decades, precisely because they can be trafficked and abused. Without a real lawyer, deportation is close to automatic.
The network that did this work — nearly 100 legal nonprofits representing more than 20,000 kids, lost its contract last Friday. Burke's doesn't begin until August 15. As Michael Lukens of the Amica Center put it, "technically nobody in the country has a contract with HHS to provide services to kids."
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