Overshadowed by Trump’s sometimes incendiary rhetoric, President Barack Obama is leaving behind a legacy of the biggest law-enforcement immigration crackdown in modern American history. The U.S. keeps a daily average of 41,000 undocumented immigrants in detention, almost double a decade ago. Half the country’s criminal prosecutions now stem from immigration violations, outnumbering drug offenses, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The value of contracts awarded to Geo and CoreCivic by the Homeland Security Department, which oversees facilities for immigrants, increased 20 percent since 2009. At the same time, the companies’ contracts from the Justice Department, which handles federal crimes, declined 40 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Geo is the biggest ICE vendor, with $900 million in contracts since 2013; CoreCivic, with $330 million, is third.

New Contracts

At least three private prisons that lost their contracts with the Justice Department during the summer, including Milan’s Cibola County Correctional Center, have won new contracts to house immigrants.

“The immigration law-enforcement regime is as strong and heavy-handed as it has ever been,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, assistant professor at University of Denver Sturm College of Law who studies immigration and criminal justice. “President-elect Trump has promised to throw that into overdrive.”

As part of his “100-Day Plan To Make America Great Again,” Trump said he would work with Congress to build a southern border wall and establish two- and five-year mandatory minimum prison sentences for illegal re-entry into the U.S.

A five-year minimum for the offense would expand the federal prison population by 65,000 prisoners, which would require the government to build more than 20 prisons, according to a 2015 American Bar Association letter to Congress.

Profiting Twice

Trump’s immigration proposals may provide opportunities for corrections companies to profit twice. After immigrants serve a prison sentence for the criminal offense of illegal re-entry, they’re often transferred to immigration officials who lock them up again, sometimes in facilities run by the same company, until they’re deported.

In recent months, border crossings have skyrocketed -- in October, 46,000 people, 40 percent more than the previous October -– partly because of worsening conditions in Central America. Also, Trump’s election has given human traffickers in the gang-weary region a new sales pitch: Go north before a more hard-line U.S. president takes office.