Tom Steyer's Anti-ICE Plan Faces Heat Over Past Private-Prison Investment

Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democratic contender in the California governor's race, is facing renewed scrutiny over past hedge-fund investments in private prisons as he pushes a high-profile anti-ICE agenda. Steyer has proposed aggressively curtailing the agency's work — including measures such as prosecuting agents and releasing certain detainees — but critics and rivals have seized on disclosures that his fund once held a stake in CoreCivic, a major operator of immigration detention facilities, a position he has since called a mistake.

The scrutiny lands against a backdrop in which immigration detention is both politically charged and heavily privatized: by 2025 nearly 90% of people in ICE custody were held in privately operated facilities, and in mid-January 2026 ICE's daily detained population reached a record high of more than 73,400. Opponents argue those facts make any past investments in companies that profit from detention particularly salient, and social media has amplified that frame — with critics like Rep. Eric Swalwell accusing Steyer of funding his campaign with profits tied to immigrant suffering, outlets and commentators highlighting an allegedly $89 million investment in CoreCivic, and Democratic attack ads and tabloid coverage calling out perceived hypocrisy.

Mainstream coverage of Steyer's anti-ICE stance has shifted accordingly: early reporting tended to emphasize his role as a well-funded progressive challenger and the policy content of his platform, while more recent pieces — driven in part by conservative outlets and viral social posts, and echoed in attack ads from rivals — have focused on his financial past and the optics of profiting from detention. That narrative reframing has moved attention from policy specifics to questions about personal financial history and political credibility, even as Steyer's admission that the investment was a mistake has been used both to deflect and to underscore critics' charges.