The $75 Million Prison That Cost $496 Million

Two days after voters handed the keys of Congress to the party that campaigned on reining in ICE, the CEO of a private prison company told a federal agency, on a public record, that there is no reason to wait.

"We would urge the ICE administration to move quickly. I think they have a need for capacity. We have the capacity. There is no reason to wait."

— Lucibeth Mayberry, president and CEO of CoreCivic, on the company's Q3 earnings call, November 5, 2026

The advice was unsolicited. CoreCivic's quarterly earnings call came on the morning of November 5, the day after the company reported its best quarter in years, two days after Americans elected a new majority to both chambers of Congress. Immigration was a top issue in that election, the one voters along the border had spent a year making personal, and the incoming Democratic majority had a single repeated demand. Keep the cameras on. Keep the receipts.

Zacks analyst Marla Marin asked the question Mayberry had been waiting for. Could the midterm results change the timing of CoreCivic's ongoing discussions with ICE about buying more of the company's facilities? The answer came in a boardroom murmur, as if the CEO were giving a customer a special price.

"We would urge the ICE administration to move quickly," she said. "I think they have a need for capacity. We have the capacity. There is no reason to wait."

Translation: a privately owned prison company, on a public record, telling the United States government to spend the country's money faster, forty-eight hours after the country voted the other way.

The advice has a specific origin. In Appleton, Minnesota, a small town in the flat western half of the state, there sits the Prairie Correctional Facility, a 1,600-bed private prison that has been dark since 2010. Records obtained by Minneapolis television station KARE 11 show that in 2025, CoreCivic offered to sell it to the State of Minnesota for $75 million. The state passed. A year later, in August 2026, the Department of Homeland Security paid $495.6 million for the same building.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has asked Congress to investigate what he calls a "massive $420 million overpayment" made with taxpayer money. CoreCivic will keep running the facility under a management contract, and expects to start receiving ICE detainees this quarter.

The company's defense is procedural rather than moral. On the earnings call, Mayberry pointed out that the federal government hired independent appraisers working under a statute-mandated "yellow book" standard, which directs appraisers to value such properties at replacement cost. "The sales price rests on the appraiser's independent conclusions and the government's review of them," she said. "Not a price set by either party." That is what the $495.6 million actually is. It is not a market price. It is the government's own calculation of what it would cost to build the prison again.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already told us what to make of that calculation. On October 30, standing at a podium in St. Cloud, Minnesota, to tout the Trump administration's fraud task force, Bessent was asked about the Appleton purchase. "I don't know anything about that," he said. "That's a waste of our time."

The fraud task force's Treasury Secretary called the fraud question a waste of time.

Three weeks later, the question belongs to a new Congress.

Here is the machine, in numbers. In the third quarter of 2026, CoreCivic sold four detention facilities to the Department of Homeland Security for $2.2 billion, roughly $1.6 billion after taxes, at an average of $307,000 per bed, as high as $371,000 per bed at the Otay Mesa facility in California. The company's reported net income for the quarter was $1,344 million, an earnings per share figure of $14.49 inflated by the sale gains. Strip those out and adjusted earnings still doubled, up 104 percent year over year.

The underlying business is doing the work. Revenue from ICE rose $75.2 million, or 34.8 percent, and federal customers now account for 53 percent of the company's total revenue. Occupancy in its residential segment hit 84 percent, the highest since the pandemic. As of September 30, CoreCivic was holding 18,300 people in ICE custody, an 80 percent increase in eighteen months. It repaid more than $700 million of debt with the sale proceeds, launched a $500 million accelerated share repurchase, and got board approval for another $500 million. And it is sitting on 5,500 idle beds, kept warm for "future government needs."

Why did the CEO say there is no reason to wait? Because the funding is already locked in. The Secure America Act, passed in June by the GOP-controlled Congress, funds ICE at historically high levels through 2029. Congress awarded ICE and Border Patrol around $240 billion across 2025 and 2026, and ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country. "This multiyear funding framework provides visibility into resources available for detention operations," Mayberry told investors.

The incoming Democrats understand the arithmetic, which is why the political chess has started before the new Congress is sworn in. Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, gave Republicans a two-word message on Election Day. "Lawyer up." Representative Bennie Thompson, who is expected to chair the House Homeland Security Committee, says the goal is to rein in an agency whose enforcement tactics have killed Americans and produced a record number of deaths in detention since the start of Trump's second term. He wants body cameras for federal immigration agents, by law. He wants face coverings banned. Since January, the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department have targeted 65 state and local officials who tried to hold ICE accountable.

The White House is moving the other way at full speed. Stephen Miller, the architect of the mass deportation campaign, was promoted to chief of staff the week after the election. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, one day after the results, posted three words on X: "Deportations will continue." On Sunday, the president himself suggested on 60 Minutes that the enforcement push may have been "too tough." He did not say what he meant to do about the money.

The election delivered the country a new Congress and an agency whose funding is already locked in through 2029. That is the structure of the whole story. Mayberry's advice to ICE was never really about speed. It was about sequencing. Sign the contracts before January, before the new committee chairmanships, before the subpoenas start arriving at the agencies that write the checks. "We cannot predict if they will do so," she added, just in case.

So the question for 2027 is no longer whether the money exists. It exists, through 2029. The question is whether a new Congress with a mandate to audit the richest law enforcement agency in America can move at the speed the CEO asked ICE to match. "There is no reason to wait," CoreCivic's CEO said. The line has been doing double duty ever since. For the agency, it is a deadline. For the Congress that is about to sit across from it, it is a description of what happens if no one does anything.