from the we-have-met-the-enemy,-and-he-is-stupid-af-yo dept

It’s easy to make fun of the federal government for paying well over market for items. We’ve all heard the stories about $900 toilets and $400 hammers and lol’ed generously, perhaps without considering that maybe the toilet was for a space shuttle or a submarine and therefore couldn’t be off-the-shelf. Maybe the hammers aren’t being used to bash in nails but used to assemble sensitive equipment that requires certain materials and reduction of blunt force.

Then again, maybe the government just spends excessive amounts of money because it has excessive amounts of money to spend. The current administration has increased our national debt to levels that seem almost hyperbolic. And this particular administration has thrown so much federal funding at ICE that it has surpassed the FBI — the mf’in FBI! — as the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency.

You’d think being over-funded would make you relaxed. With this sort of largesse, there’s really no reason for ICE to live from government shutdown-to-government shutdown. You just get what you need, splurge a little on some extras, and know that at least you won’t be furloughed the next time Congress decides an impasse is better than jettisoning toxic proposals that will never receive bipartisan support.

But what’s happening here? This just looks like the government being taken for the sucker it is by a specialist in predatory pricing.

This incident would never have come to light without the intervention of local Minnesota journalists. Reporters working for NBC affiliate KARE 11 obtained public records that show the federal government massively overpaid for vacant buildings after local officials decided CoreCivic was asking too much for a prison property it no longer had any use for.

CoreCivic found itself sitting on empty prison property in Appleton, Minnesota. The town of less than 1,400 people sits far closer to the South Dakota border than the Twin Cities. With the administration focused almost entirely on Minneapolis with its ICE-aided revenge tour of “Places Where Trump Failed To Secure A Majority of the Popular Vote,” a vacant prison in a rural area would rarely have piqued the federal government’s interest.

It certainly failed to generate any local interest when CoreCivic first offered it for sale, even though CoreCivic claimed it would include any recent improvements while generally stating that the prison that had been closed for 16 years had “ran when parked.”

KARE 11 obtained an email dated May 7, 2025, from CoreCivic representative Kelly Durham to the Deputy Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. 

The CoreCivic email states: “Yes, we would be willing to sell the facility to the State.” 

Then, CoreCivic states its asking price: “Sale price is $75M inclusive of the upgrades CoreCivic has identified would be needed to re-activate the facility.” 

A turnkey opportunity — one that had been garaged for years and apparently only driven on alternate Sundays by CoreCivic security personnel. What’s not to like? I mean, other than the fact it was located far from the current federal action and probably smelled the way things that have been abandoned for more than a decade tend to smell. (Granted, lots of prisons smell “abandoned” even when they’ve been operating at over-capacity for decades…)

The state did not wish to make CoreCivic $75 million richer just because it failed to pre-plan for this eventual (and apparently inevitable) divestment. The state of Minnesota walked, leaving CoreCivic with its empty investment that was located somewhere most people in the “caging people” business would consider to be too far out of the way to be worth the trouble.

But someone rode to CoreCivic’s rescue. It was an administration that already has a far-too-cosy relationship with private prison companies. And it was an administration that had recently given ICE far more money than it could responsibly spend.

This all added up to the obvious: ICE outbidding absolutely no one to obtain this empty prison located in Sticksville, USA for far, far, oh my god so far more than CoreCivic had valued it less than a year earlier when it was just looking to dump it on the locals.

One year later, the Trump administration agreed to use taxpayer funds to buy the same abandoned prison from CoreCivic, Inc., for $495.6 million.

This exaggerated purchase price matters for several reasons, not the least of which is the purported reason Trump has offered for his incessant — and often, violent — anti-migrant efforts in the state of Minnesota.

The price difference, $420 million, is more than taxpayers are estimated to have lost in Minnesota’s much-publicized Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.

If you’re wondering why ICE might agree to pay a highly inflated price for property previously offered for hundreds of millions of dollars less, wonder no further. This is just more Trump administration corruption achieving terminal velocity at the expense of taxpayers who just want to fill their gas tanks without going broke.

Federal records show CoreCivic donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.

Its CEO also made significant personal contributions to Trump-affiliated political committees.

It’s not just long-abandoned Minnesota prisons making bank for CoreCivic now that Trump has the purse strings. As the report points out, the same day ICE vastly overpaid for this prison, it snapped up another empty prison in Kansas for $238 million. One month earlier, CoreCivic took Trump to the cleaners for another $1.5 billion, unloading two unused facilities located in California.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not Trump’s anti-migrant activities might eventually fill these overpriced purchases with people whose rights have been violated. It only matters that the government wrote the checks and the recipient of this massive waste of taxpayer funds will remain profitable enough to throw money at the next set of politicians who might be willing to return the favor in the near future.

And even if mass incarceration in preparation for mass deportation trends downward following the forced exit of lots and lots of MAGA legislators, the United States has long had a hard-on for mass incarceration. And it’s apparently willing to pay top dollar to obtain places to lock people up, even when there’s absolutely no one else competing with it during the bidding process.

Filed Under: corruption, dhs, ice, mass deportation, minnesota, private prisons, superpredator, trump administration
Companies: core civic, corecivic