Meet the Lobbyists Behind Migrant Detention

Seventeen thriving private prison industry lobbyists on their way straight to Hell.

WASHINGTON — There is a man named Richard Hoar who fills out government paperwork, and describes his job this way: promoting “the benefits of public-private partnerships for the delivery of secure residential care.”

Secure residential care.

That is what Richard Hoar — in-house lobbyist for GEO Group, the largest private prison company in the United States — calls a cage.

He is not alone in his word choices, or his paycheck.

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Right now, at this hour, more than 70,000 human beings are sitting inside 225 detention facilities scattered across this country. The government that put them there — ICE, the one that calls itself a law enforcement agency — keeps its own numbers, and its own numbers show that nearly three out of four of those people have no criminal conviction. Not a felony. Not a misdemeanor. Not so much as a DUI that stuck.

They are in there because they are migrants, and because someone figured out long ago that migrants are worth money.

The math is not complicated. GEO Group told its investors that ICE contracts account for 43 percent of its revenue. CoreCivic — GEO’s chief rival, its partner in this particular American enterprise — pegs its ICE share at 30 percent. Together, the two companies are worth roughly six billion dollars. The day after Donald Trump won reelection, GEO’s stock jumped 41 percent. CoreCivic’s went up 29.

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The men who protect that money work on K Street, and their names are in the public record if you know where to look.

At GEO Group, the outside lobbying operation reads like a Republican Party reunion. There is Brian Darling of Liberty Government Affairs — $15,000 from GEO so far this year. There is Lanier Avant of Avant, Bishop et al — $40,000. There is Rick Sullivan of State Federal Strategies — $50,000. There is the firm Navigators Global, which sent Ryan Berger, Chris Cox, and Sarah Beatty Rogers to work GEO’s account for $100,000 more. And there is Continental Strategy, where Alejandro Garcia and Carlos Trujillo combined for $150,000 — the single biggest outside line item in GEO’s 2025 federal lobbying disclosure.

Last year GEO brought in Checkmate Government Relations, a four-lobbyist shop whose team includes Christopher LaCivita — yes, that LaCivita, one of Trump’s own 2024 campaign managers — to lobby on “contracts related to detention centers.”

The whole operation, inside and out, ran $1.38 million in federal lobbying in 2024 alone.

Richard Hoar files the paperwork.

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CoreCivic runs its own army.

Its in-house lobbyist, Jeremy Wiley, has been signing federal disclosure forms for CoreCivic since 2003. Two decades. Seventy-eight filings. Roughly $31.5 million in expenditures attributed to his hand on the pen. The man has outlasted administrations the way good furniture outlasts tenants.

Around Wiley, CoreCivic keeps long-term relationships with some of the heaviest firms on K Street. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — $320,000 in 2024, with lobbyists William Stamper and James R. Tucker Jr. on the account. Venture Government Strategies — $460,000, with Hamilton Bloom and Robert Hobart. The Vogel Group — $270,000, with Alex Vogel and Ali Khimji. Greenberg Traurig for $120,000. Miller Strategies for $140,000. Simmons & Russell Group, where lobbyist Robert Russell filed disclosures describing his work as focused on the “construction and management of privately operated prisons and detention facilities” — and on ICE funding, U.S. Marshals funding, and Bureau of Prisons appropriations.

CoreCivic spent $1.77 million on federal lobbying last year. Through just the first quarter of 2025, it has already reported $490,000 more.

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Every one of those filings includes a line of boilerplate. CoreCivic’s lobbyists are required to state, per company policy, that they do not lobby “for or against any policies or legislation that would determine the basis for an individual’s incarceration or detention.”

They just lobby for the money that pays for it.

The distinction is, in their telling, everything. In practice, it is nothing. ICE has since issued requests for proposals worth up to $45 billion for detention facilities tied directly to Trump’s border emergency declaration. GEO and CoreCivic contributed $500,000 apiece to Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee — twice what they gave in 2017.

You do not write a half-million-dollar check to an inaugural committee and then politely decline to ask for anything in return.

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Below GEO and CoreCivic, the industry runs deeper still. Management & Training Corp — MTC — runs the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico and spent $630,000 on federal lobbying in 2024, with eight lobbyists working its account, three of them fresh off government jobs. Then there is LaSalle Management, which owns immigration detention centers across the South and whose Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia became the site of accusations that a doctor performed coerced hysterectomies on detained women. LaSalle does not show up in the seven-figure federal lobbying tables. Its influence flows through campaign contributions and state capitols — quieter, harder to trace, no less deliberate.

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A Brennan Center analysis describes GEO and CoreCivic as positioned for an “enormous windfall” as the administration reopens mothballed prisons, expands bed capacity, and signs multi-year contracts from California City to Kansas. Meanwhile, Trump officials have sought to gut the internal oversight offices that investigate civil rights violations inside these same facilities.

More beds. Less oversight. The lobbyists are doing their job.

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Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, in a moment of candor that should have been a scandal and was not, recently likened the agency’s new mass deportation operation to “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”

He meant it as a compliment.

In a country that understood what it was doing, that sentence would have ended a career. Instead, it described a business model, and on K Street, Richard Hoar and Jeremy Wiley and Hamilton Bloom and the rest of them went back to their phones, their filings, and their very particular definition of residential care.

The cages stay full.

The checks keep clearing.

Help us go through the receipts in the chat: