In the next few weeks President Donald Trump is slated to release a highly-anticipated plan for an overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure, and with an anticipated total tag of nearly a trillion dollars, there will certainly be plenty of feeders fighting at the trough of public funds.

The houses of the Texas State Congress effectively split on whether to consider immigrant detention centers as “child care”-like facilities, keeping a federal judgement on acceptable standards for family detention in place for now.

With millions of undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the U.S., the Trump administration’s moves towards stricter immigration and detention regulations are all signs pointing toward profit for an established network of private prison operators.

With combined revenues of over $3 billion dollars, it’s easy enough to point to GEO Group and CCA as fueling the private incarceration industry. But between their prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, youth residential centers, and community corrections facilities, there are now 151 communities complicit across the country, where local cooperation has been necessary to the expansion of private prisons.

The expansion of private - and public - prisons across the U.S. helps illustrate the tangle created when social and economic needs come into conflict.