The Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association collected a combined six-figure sum from CoreCivic — a Tennessee-based private prison company that contracts with ICE to detain illegal immigrants — even as Democratic officials across the country ratcheted up their attacks on the very enforcement operations CoreCivic supports.
POLITICO's Saturday edition of Playbook broke the story. The DLGA scrambled to announce it would donate its CoreCivic contributions to the National Immigration Law Center, a group dedicated to advancing the interests of low-income immigrants. The DGA took a different approach: it kept the money.
Neither organization seemed troubled by the arrangement until someone noticed.
This wasn't an unsolicited check arriving in the mail. On Nov. 9, 2023, a DLGA staffer emailed CoreCivic directly, requesting a $50,000 donation for the 2024 election cycle. That's an organization whose members have spent recent weeks savaging ICE — actively soliciting cash from a company that houses ICE detainees.
DLGA spokesperson Christina Freundlich told POLITICO the organization would be:
Donating any 2024-2025 contributions from CoreCivic to the National Immigration Law Center.
She added the DLGA will "no longer accept" CoreCivic contributions "going forward." A convenient line to draw after the money's already been spent building the infrastructure for candidates who now campaign against the company's core business, the Daily Caller reported.
The DGA, meanwhile, didn't even pretend to feel conflicted. A spokesperson offered this remarkable statement to POLITICO:
"We strongly condemn the Trump administration's appalling immigration tactics, and the only way to stop them is by electing more Democrats."
And then, the kicker:
Every contribution to the DGA helps elect Democratic governors and none of them have any impact on policy decisions made by governors.
So the money is clean because it doesn't influence anyone. That's a novel theory of campaign finance — one that the left has never extended to Republican donors.
The DGA's chair is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a rumored 2028 presidential candidate who has positioned himself as one of the most vocal critics of federal immigration enforcement. Following the fatal Minneapolis shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration enforcement officers in January, Beshear escalated sharply. He told CNN:
They [officers] are operating with aggressive tactics that are not appropriate for law enforcement, they are not following our Constitution and giving people their rights. The idea that they have a memo that says that they can just barge into someone's house without a real warrant … I guess they missed the day they taught law in law school. It's incredibly concerning.
He went further with the Kentucky Lantern:
I've never seen a government agency push a group of law enforcement to be as aggressive and use the words of aggressiveness that I have with what is being pushed out there on ICE.
Strong words from the man leading an organization that quietly pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company providing beds and facilities for those same enforcement operations. A spokesperson for Beshear referred POLITICO to the DGA's statement. Neither Beshear nor DLGA Chair Kyle Evans Gay, the lieutenant governor of Delaware, responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.
CoreCivic's business is straightforward. According to its own website, the company "partners with the U.S. Marshals Service and ICE to provide safe environments where detainees can reside temporarily as they go through their legal due process." In September 2025, the company announced new ICE contracts to:
Utilize 3,593 beds at two facilities we own in core enforcement areas of the United States.
The expected annual revenue from those two facilities alone: nearly $200 million.
CoreCivic also emphasizes, through a chart on its website, that the company does not "enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws, or have any say whatsoever in an individual's deportation or release." The company provides detention infrastructure. What Democrats are objecting to is the enforcement itself — carried out by federal officers, under federal authority.
CoreCivic Senior Director of Public Affairs Ryan Gustin told the DCNF that the company's political engagement is bipartisan by design:
CoreCivic engages in the political process to include being corporate members of national organizations that represent elected officials around the country and across the political spectrum. CoreCivic's focus is to educate policymakers on solutions that partnership corrections can provide to help policymakers address serious national challenges.
For context, CoreCivic gave a combined $62,000 to Republican congressional candidates in 2024, according to OpenSecrets, along with $2,500 to Democratic Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop, described as a longtime moderate lawmaker. Those figures only capture federal candidates — state-level organizations like the DGA and DLGA aren't tracked the same way, which is precisely why the POLITICO report revealed something the public record wouldn't.
The Democratic playbook on immigration enforcement has settled into a familiar rhythm: denounce the operations, demonize the officers, cast the entire apparatus as unconstitutional overreach — and then quietly cash the checks from companies that make the apparatus function.
This is the pattern that defines modern progressive politics on nearly every contentious issue. The outrage is always public. The accommodation is always private. Democratic governors run ads about compassion and constitutional rights while their campaign arms solicit five-figure donations from the company building detention beds. The DLGA's decision to redirect its CoreCivic money to the National Immigration Law Center — a group that describes itself as advancing "the rights and opportunities of low-income immigrants and their loved ones" — is less an act of principle than a PR rinse cycle. Take the money, launder it through a sympathetic organization, and hope no one connects the dots.
The DGA didn't even bother with that step. It kept the money and declared that donations don't influence policy. Imagine a Republican organization making that argument about fossil fuel donations. The editorial boards would spontaneously combust.
What makes this more than a campaign finance story is the timing. Democrats haven't just been criticizing detention policy in the abstract. They've been leveraging the deaths of real people — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — to build a political case against federal enforcement. Beshear's language about aggressive tactics and unconstitutional memos isn't incidental rhetoric. It's the foundation of what looks increasingly like a presidential campaign pitch.
And the organization he chairs took six figures from the company that houses the detainees.
The left's position on private detention contractors has always been that their profit motive corrupts the system — that companies like CoreCivic have a financial incentive to lock more people up. If Democrats actually believe that, accepting CoreCivic's money makes them complicit in the very system they claim to oppose. If they don't believe it, then the entire anti-detention argument is theater.
Either way, the money spent just fine.
