Two of the biggest private prison corporations in America—the companies ICE pays to lock people behind bars—have been dumping campaign money into at least nine of this fall’s Republican Senate races. More than $150,000 of it.
Cable news was too busy bowing to Trump to notice. Corporate reporters didn’t take the time to add it up. We spent days buried in campaign filings to pull the receipts and connect the dots ourselves.
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We Found ICE’s Jailers Funding Nine Republicans
We couldn’t find anyone who had put this together, so we did.
We went through the campaign filings of 11 Republicans running for the Senate this fall and pulled the checks from the executives, board members, and PACs of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two biggest companies ICE pays to lock people up. At least nine of the 11 took the money: a combined total of more than $150,000 to their campaigns and fundraising committees. We found no refunds in any of their filings through their latest reports.
Here’s why it matters. On July 1, 2025, Senate Republicans passed Trump’s budget bill when JD Vance broke a 50-50 tie. It included $45 billion to build more immigration detention centers. Both companies lobbied on it. ICE pays these companies mostly by the person, by the night, so every raid fills a bed and every bed pays. From April through June of this year, the two brought in $1.4 billion in revenue. The man running ICE today, David Venturella, spent 11 years at GEO.
Three weeks before the vote, CoreCivic’s PAC wrote checks to two campaigns: Dan Sullivan’s in Alaska and Ashley Hinson’s in Iowa. Both voted for the bill. Ashley Moody of Florida voted yes, too—and that fall, a dozen GEO executives and employees gave to her fundraising committee. One of them used to run ICE.
Jon Husted of Ohio voted yes. Nine weeks later, CoreCivic’s then-CEO maxed out to his campaign. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska voted yes, and that October CoreCivic’s PAC sent his campaign $5,000. The same day, it sent $5,000 to Michael Whatley’s campaign in North Carolina.
That former CEO, Damon Hininger, didn’t stop there. He gave $25,000 to Ken Paxton’s joint fundraising committee in Texas and $660,000 to the Republican National Committee. And Susan Collins? She chairs the committee that writes ICE’s budget. Both companies’ PACs send her campaign checks.
Last December, Nenko Gantchev, 56, a Chicago business owner, died in GEO’s detention center in Baldwin, Michigan. ICE said it suspected natural causes, and a medical examiner later agreed. But four members of Congress had demanded an investigation—two of them citing reports from other detainees that he asked for medical help and didn’t get it in time. Ten weeks after he died, GEO’s PAC sent a check to Mike Rogers, the Republican running for Senate in Michigan.
If ICE came to your town this year, these are the candidates its jailers are funding, in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. Now you know. Every one of those seats is on the ballot in 32 days.
The campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.
Georgia Voters’ Data Stays Out Of Trump’s Hands
In July 2025, the DOJ asked Georgia for its whole voter list along with birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers. According to the state, the DOJ wanted to run it all through the federal SAVE database to check on everyone’s citizenship. Later, it sent Georgia a deal to sign: if the DOJ found a problem with your name, the state would have to remove your record and send the whole list back again.
But Georgia handed over only what state law allows—nothing with the private numbers. So the regime sued. In January, a judge threw that case out because it was filed in the wrong court.
The regime tried again. But on Wednesday, Judge Victoria Marie Calvert threw that one out too. “Federal law does not preempt Georgia’s voter privacy law,” she wrote. Georgia’s law protecting your private information still stands. Calvert also noted the DOJ “has not agreed that the information would remain confidential.”
The regime says it will probably appeal. But it has now lost 26 of these voter-data lawsuits. For now, Georgia voters’ Social Security numbers stay out of its hands.
Jerome Powell Cleared. Trump’s Smear Is Dead.
For more than a year, Trump treated Jerome Powell like a crook, hinting at fraud over the Fed’s over-budget headquarters renovation while he floated firing him. The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether Powell misled Congress. After a string of losses in court, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in DC, dropped it in April to wait on the Fed’s inspector general, its own internal watchdog.
On Wednesday, the watchdog delivered. Michael Horowitz’s 120-page report says the project was badly managed, then shuts the door: “At no point during our evaluation did we find reasonable grounds to believe that a violation of federal criminal law had occurred.” No misconduct, either. Even Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair Trump picked to replace Powell, agreed with the report, calling it “thorough and rigorous.”
Trump demanded Powell resign anyway, asked Attorney General Todd Blanche to study the report, and said Powell should be sued if he won’t quit. Powell can still stay on the Fed board until January 2028. The law only lets Trump fire him for serious wrongdoing, and the watchdog just found no crime.
30,000 Prison Workers Just Got Their Union Back
On Tuesday, about 30,000 people who work in America’s federal prisons won their union contract back, for now. A year ago, the Bureau of Prisons director tore it up and thanked Trump for being able to do so. Then the bureau went after its own people.
Judge Vernon Oliver found that it pressured workers into not taking sick leave and threatened to fire union reps who talked to Congress or reporters. The union told the court one worker even got a letter accusing them of abusing sick leave—while they were in the hospital for kidney surgery.
The bureau claimed it was about national security. But Oliver wasn’t buying it: “It is evident that national security was not the basis for this termination.” He ordered the contract “immediately” reinstated while the case goes on. The DOJ asked him to make the union put up an $8.75 million bond first—Oliver made it only $1,000.
The same corrupt regime that found $45 billion for immigration jails is trying to break the union of the people who work in its own prisons. They lost.
Thirty-two days left until the midterms.
Corporate media won’t touch stories like these because they’re absolutely terrified of losing access. We don’t care about access. We care about the truth.
Nine Republican Senate candidates took private prison money. Most of it sat buried in thousands of pages of federal filings. So we spent days tracking it down, and named them publicly so you can hold them accountable.
No one can ever call me to kill one of our investigations. There’s no billionaire or advertiser here telling us to take it easy on Trump. All thanks to the readers who fund us, which keeps us completely independent.
We have at least 10 more battleground investigations locked and ready to drop before Election Day. But running down these filings around the clock only happens if we get the funding.
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Onward!
Scott
Should these nine candidates give the money back?
Would you trust the regime with your Social Security number?
While lawmakers are back in their districts dodging floor votes, constituent mail is the only metric their staff can't ignore. Take two minutes today to put your name on the record across these four active fights:
Close the Dilley ICE Facility and End Child Detention Secrecy
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-close-the-dilley-ice-facility-end-child-detention-secrecy/
Defund ICE
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-defund-ice/
Demand the Unredacted Epstein Files
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-demand-acting-ag-blanche-release-all-of-the-epstein-files-now/
Stop the Yosemite Luxury Land Giveaway
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
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Thank heavens for The Dworkin Report, HCR, Meidas team, Katie Phang and the many, many other warriors out there fighting hard.