Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to shrink its network of more than 200 detention facilities to just 34 government-owned sites, according to local officials briefed this week on the plan, a move that would affect longtime private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic Inc.

If carried out, the shift would replace the current patchwork of local jails and privately run prisons with a centralized system of larger facilities, most of them industrial warehouses, owned by the Department of Homeland Security. The majority of people currently in ICE custody are in facilities run by GEO or CoreCivic.

David Keener, the mayor of Social Circle, Georgia, City Manager Eric Taylor and City Attorney Jay Crowley said they were told of the 34-facility plan during a meeting this week with a DHS delegation led by Tim Kaiser, deputy chief of staff at US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The meeting focused on the federal government’s proposal to convert a large warehouse in the city, about 45 miles east of Atlanta, into an immigration detention center that residents and city leaders oppose. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the details shared in the meeting.

A person familiar with the administration’s plan, who asked not to be named because they’re not publicly authorized to discuss the proposals, confirmed that ICE will now rely primarily on government-owned facilities but that private companies will maintain a role in operations, which may include providing services such as medical care and security. Companies are already competing for the contracts to convert and operate the warehouses DHS has purchased.

GEO Group, through a letter from its lawyer after the story's publication, said it sees opportunity in the government’s new proposal: “Because GEO Group and similarly situated contractors are compensated on a per-bed basis for the detention services they provide, a plan that dramatically expands total bed capacity and in which private service providers participate is expected to potentially expand the GEO Group’s business.” A spokesperson for CoreCivic said the company is “proud” of its “longstanding relationship” with ICE,” but directed “any questions about contracts or their current initiatives” to the agency.

The consolidation would represent a significant new detail in the administration’s $38 billion Detention Reengineering Initiative, which was revealed last week. President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill last year allocated $45 billion to detention expansion. The planning documents showed the redesigned system would give the government a 92,600-bed capacity through eight large-scale detention centers capable of holding up to 10,000 detainees each, 16 processing centers with capacity of about 1,500 each, and 10 existing ICE-operated “turnkey” facilities.

Currently, the largest ICE detention facility in the country is a tent camp on an El Paso military base that detains about 3,000 people daily.

The move to government-owned jails also creates an immigration detention infrastructure that could outlast the Trump administration and its mass deportation effort. In past administrations, including during Trump's first term, immigration authorities said they were routinely forced to release many thousands of migrants into the US in part because of a lack of jail capacity. In the past two decades, Congress has approved spending for about 30,000 to 45,000 immigration detention beds a year. The new government-owned network would more than double that capacity.

The timeline for winding down existing facilities and what happens to the contracts tied to them remains unclear. But if implemented as described, the consolidation would mark one of the most sweeping restructurings of the US immigration detention system in decades, reducing the number of sites while still increasing the number of people who can be held in immigration detention.

Still, the change could affect companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which together detain roughly 58% of people in ICE custody, according to company disclosures. Contracts from ICE accounted for nearly half of GEO’s projected revenue in 2025, and more than 40% of CoreCivic’s business in the fourth quarter. Cities and counties could also lose revenue if agreements to hold immigrant detainees in local government-owned facilities are canceled or not renewed.

In recent years, GEO and CoreCivic have grown increasingly dependent on contracts with the agency. That’s because federal criminal incarceration has decreased, in part because of sentencing reforms passed under President Barack Obama. ICE guarantees revenue that can fill a void left by other agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the US Marshals Service.

Shares of both companies spiked after Trump won the 2024 election, promising to crack down on immigration. But much of those gains have been erased. In fact, all of Geo’s election-linked gains were wiped out earlier this month as public backlash over ICE, disappointing earnings, and a looming DHS shutdown spooked investors. CoreCivic shares have dropped 22% from their November 2024 high.

After Trump’s election win, GEO announced it was investing $70 million to build out its ICE services, including detention facilities and secure monitoring services, citing "potentially unprecedented future growth opportunities" for that arm of its business.

GEO and CoreCivic are now competing with a broader group of companies for contracts to construct and operate the new facilities ICE envisions. Bloomberg reported in January on the agency’s plans to convert 23 industrial warehouses across the country into immigration jails.

DHS has purchased at least seven warehouses over the past several weeks. Three of them are planned to be large-scale jails, including the one in Social Circle.

A shortlist of companies has been selected as eligible to compete for contracts to build out and operate the warehouses as jails. Proposals for the first sites, including in Hagerstown, Maryland; El Paso, Texas; and Social Circle, have already been submitted. Taylor, Social Circle’s city manager who was in the meeting with DHS officials this week, said they expect contracts to be awarded within the next week.

But the pace of DHS’s plans to convert those warehouses has been thrown into doubt as some warehouse owners have pulled out of deals with the agency in the face of community backlash. Local officials in many of the jurisdictions where ICE has proposed the conversions oppose the efforts, with some citing a lack of infrastructure to service the projects. In Social Circle, for example, DHS has said it will need more than 1 million gallons of water per day to meet the facility’s sewage needs. The entire city uses 660,000 gallons per day and is operating at capacity.

“The City’s concerns regarding water and sewer infrastructure have not been addressed to our satisfaction,” Social Circle officials said in a Wednesday evening statement outlining their meeting with the federal government. “We continue to have more questions than answers.”

In an earnings call last week, GEO Executive Chairman George Zoley said the company is “cautiously participating” in the plans to convert warehouses into jails and that they have a relationship with one of the companies eligible for the upcoming contracts. But he also said he’s hoping the more traditional arrangements continue.

“We've been a long-term four-decade partner with ICE, and we want to be supportive and playing a role in this new initiative and hopefully see our idle facilities be utilized,” Zoley said.

In the call, Zoley said that the company had executed a warehouse-to-jail conversion only once before, and it was for a capacity of 200 people — significantly smaller than ICE’s current plans for as many as 10,000 beds. “The operational implications of how you manage such a facility, particularly a large-scale facility is going to be concerning,” Zoley said. “It has to be carefully evaluated.”

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