GEO Group is accused of illegally financing Trump.
It's unusual for a publicly traded corporation to donate to a super-PAC, but in August, private prison company GEO Group steered $150,000 to Rebuild America Now, a pro-Donald Trump outfit launched by the GOP nominee's longtime friend, developer Tom Barrack.
The timing of the GEO Group's contribution is significant. It cut a $100,000 check to the super-PAC on August 19, the day after the Justice Department announced that it would phase out the use of private prisons. (The company's political action committee donated $50,000 to Rebuild America Now a week before the announcement.)
[source : Private Prison Company Bankrolls Pro-Trump Super-PAC, Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/private-prison-company-geo-group-backs-pro-trump-super-pac, 17th October 2016]
GEO and another donator to Trump, CoreCivic, stand to gain from Trump's immigration plans.
Geo Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the world, hailed President Donald Trump’s newly-announced immigration plans on a call with investors Wednesday and said that even more business could be on the way if a Republican congressional proposal to expand the incarceration of certain immigrants make it into law.
“With the respect to detention services, in support of border security, we would continue to be the largest provider of detention services to the three largest government agencies, that is ICE, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service,” George Zoley, the chief executive of the company, boasted.
“With this increased and expanded approach to border security the first agency that will need additional capacity is ICE,” Zoley said, referring to the administration’s broad immigration orders.
...CoreCivic, the private prison firm formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, announced on its earning call earlier this month that the firm expects new business. “When coupled with the above average rate of crossings along the southwest border, these executive orders appear likely to significantly increase the need for safe, humane, and appropriate detention bed capacity that we have available,” CoreCivc chief Damon Hininger noted.
...As we previously reported, Geo Group was one of the first large publicly-traded firms to make significant campaign contributions to the Trump election effort last year. The firm gave $50,000 to a pro-Trump Super PAC and $45,000 to the Trump campaign via its joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee. CoreCivic also donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, recent filings show.
[source : Trump’s New Immigration Crackdown Has Private Prison Investors Salivating, The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/geo-group-trump/, 22nd February 2017]
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