The Salvadoran woman crossed the U.S. border and sought refuge in Texas a year ago, fleeing from her father's murderers back home.

She has spent the months since then locked inside a 1,500-bed federal detention center wreathed in razor wire on a dead-end road in Conroe, north of Houston.

Her confinement in the Joe Corley Detention Facility, awaiting a decision on her request for asylum, has cost taxpayers nearly $25,000, paid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to GEO Group, a leading national for-profit prison company, and its business partner, Montgomery County.

Without windows and confined indoors, it's unlikely that Yesica, 22 - her family asked that her full name be withheld for her safety - has heard the sounds of construction as GEO hurriedly erects a second, $110 million, 1,100-bed facility nearby to house a surge in the number of immigrants being rounded up by immigration agencies. When completed, Conroe will host the nation's largest immigrant detention complex.

The private prison business is booming as President Donald Trump delivers on his campaign promise to crack down on immigrants here illegally. In the first three months of his presidency, at least 113,828 immigrants were locked up in 180 different facilities nationwide - a 10 percent increase over that period in 2016, data obtained by the Houston Chronicle shows.

Although arrests of those crossing the border declined, interior arrests skyrocketed.

That's good news for GEO Group and its chief competitor, the Nashville-based CoreCivic, formerly called Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA.

Both companies had revenues of more than $2 billion last year, and their stock values have doubled since Trump's election.

Not only are more beds filled, but the time the ICE detainees are being held - as more try to fight deportation - will likely increase from the typical 35-day average stay, GEO officials said recently in a briefing to investors on 2nd quarter earnings.

To house the new surge of detainees, the Trump administration has proposed pumping an additional $1.6 billion into ICE's budget for 2018, boosting the number of beds in detention facilities nationwide from 34,000 to 51,000.

GEO Group and CoreCivic will provide many of those beds. They own and operate nearly all of the largest ICE detention centers, sprawling prison-like facilities that hold as many as 2,000 and are located in far-flung cities and towns from Tacoma, Wash., to Adelanto, Calif., to Conroe.

Furthermore, ICE detention contracts help boost the companies' profits because they include target populations or quotas, offer guaranteed minimum payments for family detention centers and allow private facilities to pay detainees a mere $1 a day for up to eight hours work to reduce cooking and cleaning expenses.

More being detained

A New America Keep up with the latest immigration coverage here. To see more stories about the crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally, go here.

Read More

Among Trump's first actions was rescinding key immigration actions by the previous administration that had adversely affected both companies' profits and stock prices. Trump ended a policy that had narrowed the scope of immigrants targeted for deportation in the interior to those with more serious criminal convictions, and he reversed a plan to phase for-profit detention centers for federal prisoners.

Already in his first months in office, more immigrants are being detained and fewer are being released. In 2016, an average of 2,400 detainees were being released from custody every month through ICE's prosecutorial discretion; that number plunged to about 100 through June this year, according to data released by the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse.

Nationwide, between February and late June of this year, ICE agents arrested more than 62,200 immigrants, a third more than in 2016, according to federal statistics released to the Houston Chronicle.

At least 25 of the contract detention centers regularly used by ICE this year also are in Texas. They hold about a third of the nation's ICE detainees.

Texas also has more privately-operated detention centers than any other state - and new deals continue to be negotiated. They include arrangements to repurpose or reuse for-profit federal prisons that had been sued for civil rights abuses or targeted for termination by the Obama administration.

No company is earning more from the detention boom than GEO, based in Boca Raton, Fla., which lists ICE as its number one customer.

Click here to read four storylines from the frontline of the immigration debate. Aggressive federal enforcement, controversial laws and heated political rhetoric are pushing Houston’s immigrants – documented and undocumented – deeper into the shadows.

The company contributed substantially to Trump's election campaign and to his inauguration. It also faces accusations that it illegally contributed $225,000 through one of its subsidiaries to a pro-Trump super PAC called Rebuilding America Now, despite a ban on federal contractor cash, according to a complaint pending with the Federal Elections Commission that was filed by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. The Campaign Legal Center has alleged in a related Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it believes that GEO Group may already have profited from its illegal donation through new business.

GEO Group Spokesman Pablo Paez has called the Campaign Legal Center's complaint an "absolutely baseless and meritless allegation."

So far this year, GEO Group has announced more new immigration-related business deals than CoreCivic. GEO's ICE deals have steadily grown since 2012, when it hired David Venturella, ICE's former head of deportation and detention operations. In July, GEO hired ICE's senior executive operating officer, Daniel Ragsdale.

GEO is positioning itself to do even more business with ICE. In April, it bought out a smaller rival company - CEC, which owned and managed 12,000 beds, including an ICE detention center in Polk County just north of Houston. That acquisition was expected to boost its total revenues by about $250 million, the company reported.

In May, it obtained the first big ICE detention center construction contract awarded under the Trump administration - the 10-year deal to expand and operate Conroe's Corley Detention Center worth an estimated $400 million.

That same month, GEO released its first quarter 2017 report, revealing that the company's net income rose to $40.4 million compared to $32.4 million for the first quarter of 2016 - up nearly 25 percent.

Second quarter income dropped to $31 million - in part due to fewer border crossers. But it was still up compared to 2016, the company reported recently.

CoreCivic's first quarter report showed overall revenues were flat but also boasted of profits generated by "higher average daily population from Immigration and Customs Enforcement across multiple facilities in our portfolio."

CoreCivic's numbers were increased partly by deals in December 2016 through which ICE agreed to rent out space in two former federal prison facilities that had lost Bureau of Prison contracts.

Family centers

Some of the most lucrative private detention deals involve two ICE family centers built in Texas without public bidding under what the government considered an emergency - mass arrivals of families and unaccompanied children from Central America.

Under the Trump administration, both Texas' family detention center contracts retain guaranteed minimum payments, even though the numbers of border crossings have dropped dramatically.

Back in 2014, GEO Group agreed to convert an existing men's prison to a 1,100-bed family detention center in South Texas by adding playgrounds and libraries through its ICE partnership with Karnes County. CoreCivic, in turn, piggybacked on an existing partnership it had as an ICE subcontractor for the Arizona desert city of Eloy - best known as home to one of America's largest for-profit prison complexes - to build a brand new 2,400-bed family detention center in the Texas town of Dilley.

The original Dilley contract approved by the Obama administration in response to the flood of unaccompanied immigrant children, would have paid $1.1 billion annually.

Although the guaranteed monthly payments were later reduced, CoreCivic reported earning $244.7 million from the family center Dilley in 2015 - about 13 percent of its total revenue.

In 2017, GEO's family detention facility in Karnes and CoreCivic's in Dilley have been mostly emptied - partly because fewer families arrived after Trump's immigration policy announcements and partly because of a federal court order that requires children to be released from any secure facility within three weeks.

Between January and April, both the Karnes and Dilley facilities ran as low as 20 percent of their capacity, according to information obtained by the Chronicle.

A mother's anguish

One of those languishing behind bars at the family center in Karnes was Afghan mother Samira Hakimi, who was detained for more than five months in 2017. She became depressed as she watched her two sons - ages 4 and 8 - held long beyond the court's three-week limit, according to Amy Fischer, a spokesman for the San Antonio-based nonprofit RAICES.

Hakimi had faced persecution in her native Afghanistan for helping girls learn English. So she had fled with her husband, children, brother and sister-in-law across the Atlantic and through Mexico to the Texas border. All requested asylum, but the women and men had been separated, according to ICE policy.

In early May, Hakimi removed a scarf she normally used to cover her head as a Muslim and wrapped it around her neck in a suicide attempt. Perhaps if she were dead, she thought, her boys would be freed, Fischer said.

"She has a history of depression and being detained was very hard for her - there had been times where she was threatened in Afghanistan and had attempted suicide," Fischer said.

"And this is how desperate she (felt) in a detention center that is arguably some of the best conditions you will find – she was with her children and had greater access to counsel than you would see in regular adult detention centers."

Hakimi eventually won release in early June when, a few days after she returned from a hospital, her asylum claim was granted. She and her sons joined family in California. But her husband, brother and brother's wife and baby remained locked up longer.

Many older ICE's detention contracts were not advertised and involve local governments that can subcontract with private detention companies. The result: Many of the nation's for-profit immigration detention centers involve murky and little-known Inter-governmental Service Agreement (IGSA) contracts that ICE generally keeps secret unless it's sued through a Freedom of Information law, nonpartisan watchdog groups say.

Questions of secrecy

The secrecy and unusual subcontracting in detention deals has made ICE contracts even more open to waste and abuse, said Mark Fleming, national litigation coordinator at the National Immigrant Justice Center, who has reviewed hundreds of contracts gathered only after lengthy Freedom of Information court fights.

"It sure seems like it's an end-run around ... transparency and accountability as to how our federal tax dollars are being spent," Fleming said.

Trump's proposed 2018 budget retains controversial quotas - target populations - for detainees held in nearly all of the nation's largest for-profit ICE detention centers. Those quotas can save ICE money if they keep beds filled - but also protect private companies' profits. In its earnings call Tuesday, GEO officials reaffirmed that those quotas, which guarantee certain payment levels even if beds go unfilled, are an important part of their business model.

ICE defends its contracting processes as saving time and money and spokespersons say civil rights and taxpayers' money are protected through its regular inspections and audits.

But advocates argue that quotas encourage ICE to transfer immigrants far away from relatives and lawyers to fill large for-profit centers, some of which are an hour or more from major cities. Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have scrambled to set up satellite offices near more remote sites like the 2,000-bed CoreCivic detention center in Stewart County in western Georgia.

Quotas also have encouraged Texas immigration judges "to deny bond and hold asylum-seekers longer, even when they pose no threat," said Bob Libal, executive director of the Austin-based Grassroots Leadership, which closely monitors Texas detention centers.

In its 2017 quarterly report, GEO itself identified quotas, described as its "ability to sustain company-wide occupancy rates at its facilities," as a major factor in its ability to turn a profit.

Families separated

At Conroe's Corley center, meanwhile, immigrants like Yesica, whose family fled El Salvador after the murder of her father, languish behind razor wire, and generate a payment for private companies and their local government partners - varying from about $67 a night at Conroe to around $300 a night at Texas' two family detention centers.

Yesica was separated from her mother and two younger brothers at the border when the family initially crossed in 2015 because she was over 18. Alone in a Border Patrol holding cell, she agreed to be deported.

The others remained in the U.S. and were released under a federal court order that generally prohibits detention of minor children beyond three weeks.

In August 2016, Yesica returned to Texas illegally after again being threatened by her father's killers. She was again arrested and has been in detention ever since. Her mother, resettled by a nonprofit 1,000 miles away, communicates with Yesica by mail. She hopes to be reunited before their immigration case is considered: "We have never before been separated and I know she is suffering," she said.

That court date is three years off due to record backlogs that have grown to 500,000 cases under the Trump administration's crackdown.