Donald Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of undocumented people and a related expansion of US detention facilities is getting an unexpected head start from Joe Biden – and private prison companies are already cashing in.

The Biden administration has, for the past year, been in the process of extending contracts for private sector immigration jails across the US and exploring options for expanding detention capacity, a Guardian investigation has found.

This is despite both the US president’s previous statements opposing such private jails and the fact that many facilities have a reputation for inhumane conditions.

For this story, the Guardian reviewed hundreds of pages of contracting documents, government statements, inspection reports and private prison contractor calls with investors.

The investigation reveals that during this final year of Biden’s presidency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) federal agency has been working on extending at least 14 contracts with private prison companies to run a number of immigration detention centers across the country, against significant opposition from Democrats and advocates.

All those facilities have fallen under intense scrutiny by, variously, federal government watchdogs, the US Senate and advocates, examining allegations of troubling and dangerous detention conditions. But the White House has resisted protests from congressional Democrats and campaign groups about the scale and standard of detention.

“The Biden administration has increased the number of people in detention, doubled down on anti-immigrant, Trump-era deterrence policies, and expanded detention capacity in direct conflict with its own promises to end for-profit incarceration and bring fairness to the immigration system,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national advocacy working with detained immigrants.

Instead of reassuring and pre-emptively protecting many terrified families and workers among the 11 million undocumented people in the US, the Biden administration has been working on contracts for more detention beds. These plans may not all get finalized, but private prison companies are enthusiastic about expansion opportunities now, as well as next year.

“Let us be clear: Trump’s return to the White House, and his unprecedented mass deportation and immigration detention agenda will be catastrophic for all Americans,” Shah said. Families face being split up and communities turned upside down, she said. That’s apart from huge cost and economic production implications.

“Biden now has a last chance to take decisive action to prevent catastrophe for millions of people and avoid handing the keys to an expanded and inhumane detention and deportation system to the next administration,” she added. There are no signs of such action so far in Biden’s waning weeks.

Private prison contracts are negotiated by the number of “beds” in a facility. Documents reviewed by the Guardian show that Ice is in talks to add bed space in many locations, including in New Jersey, the midwest and several west coast cities that would add capacity to detain a total of at least 4,850 more people, amid plans to create new facilities or expand existing ones. That’s in addition to the almost 39,000 people currently held in federal immigration custody.

Biden’s push is already “the greatest level of procurement activity we’ve seen with Ice in over a decade, demonstrating the continued need for additional detention solutions in various locations throughout the US”, Damon Hininger, the president and CEO of private contractor CoreCivic, said during a post-election call with investors.

CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest private prison contractors, reckon that the incoming Trump administration will be a further boon for their businesses and they are ready to assist the Republican president-elect’s mission to deport millions. People will likely be detained for a period between being arrested and expelled, as legal and logistical processes play out.

“This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government and the incoming Trump administration toward achieving a much more aggressive immigration policy with regard to interior enforcement and border enforcement, and the removal of criminal aliens predominantly from this country,” said Brian Evans, the CEO of GEO Group, during a call with investors after Trump’s victory.

The White House and Ice did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

Private prison contractors GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, Akima and Abyon LLC did not respond to requests for comment before publication. CoreCivic sent a statement.

“CoreCivic is committed to providing safe, humane and appropriate care for the people in our facilities,” a CoreCivic spokesperson said. “Our facilities adhere to all Ice standards and are monitored by Ice officials every day. Our facilities are also audited regularly and without notice several times a year, and they are routinely visited by elected officials, attorneys, families and volunteers.”

In mid-November, nearly 200 organizations wrote a letter to Biden and to the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, urging them to close detention centers and halt expansion efforts before Trump takes office.

“Facilities across the system have documented instances of physical abuse, inadequate food and water, negligent or abusive medical care, unsanitary conditions, failed plumbing and more. Avoidable deaths in Ice detention centers are at record numbers,” the letter said.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised a significant shift from Trump’s first term hardline immigration policies, including promising an end to privately-run detention centers.

“No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence,” Biden had said. But four years on, the administration continues the rightward turn away from its 2020 promises and some early actions. Especially in the run-up to the 2024 elections, with immigration a central issue and a crackdown on asylum, Ice leaned in to expanding immigration detention.

The 110 Ice facilities throughout the country typically detain undocumented people going through deportation proceedings as well as recently-arrived asylum seekers fighting their case to stay in the US but whom the government has barred from release while awaiting court dates. Although immigration detention is a civil not criminal system, conditions inside Ice detention centers are often indistinguishable from jails and prisons. Some are, indeed, former jails and prisons run by for-profit companies on government contracts.

Texas has the most Ice detainees, followed by Louisiana, then California.

Contract documents show that the Biden administration aims to add detention beds in Phoenix, Arizona, El Paso, Texas, Seattle and San Francisco, as well as other locations, and that Ice is now reviewing companies’ bids.

“It is deeply concerning that Ice would expand private detention facilities now – just months before the inauguration of a president-elect who has promised to terrorize immigrant communities by detaining and deporting millions of people,” Senator Cory Booker said in a statement to the Guardian.

He added: “I will continue to fight to ensure that detained immigrants are treated with dignity and that we value the wellbeing of immigrant communities in New Jersey above the share price of for-profit detention corporations.”

Earlier this month Trump confirmed he would use the military to assist in mass deportations and adviser Stephen Miller said military funds would be used to create new “vast holding facilities” to process migrants for deportation.

Meanwhile, Biden has not backed away from his tougher stance.

“It’s really just a step backwards,” said Esmeralda Santos, a lead organizer with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, a group helping migrants in detention, adding: “We’re seeing Biden replicate some of the policies Trump was interested in and it’s really discouraging to see that. I thought we could have more faith in Biden. He let us down, honestly.”

In September, a federal watchdog report on 17 unannounced inspections at Ice detention facilities, spread across the country, found many horrible conditions.

The indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges is a disaster for Israel. It is also a huge problem for the western alliance.

Israel is getting full-throated bipartisan support in the US, as it attempts to fight off the International Criminal Court’s charges against its prime minister and former defence minister. But most governments in the EU, as well as Britain, Australia and Canada, are likely to respect the indictment. However reluctantly, they will have to arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot on their soil.

Even in normal times, this split between the US and its main allies would be very difficult. But these are far from normal times. Donald Trump, who will be president from January 20, has already pledged to take actions that are profoundly threatening to the interests of America’s friends.

Trump has promised to impose tariffs of 10-20 per cent, which will hit European and Asian exporters. His commitment to the Nato alliance is in doubt. And his plan for a peace deal with Russia could imperil the security of Europe.

Another bitter transatlantic confrontation — this time over Israel — is the last thing the western alliance needs. But that is what is coming.

Some Israeli ministers are already gleefully anticipating that the Trump administration will allow Israel to formally annex parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. That would be regarded as dangerous and illegal by the EU.

The Trump administration will almost certainly push through sanctions against the prosecutor and staff of the ICC. There is also talk in Republican circles of destroying the court, perhaps by threatening to sanction the countries that finance it. Japan, Germany, France and Britain are the four biggest donors to the ICC.

Neither Israel nor the US seems keen to engage in detail with the actual charges in the indictment, which include accusations that Israel has murdered civilians and used “starvation as a method of warfare”. Instead, the Trumpist right embraces Netanyahu’s claim that the ICC is driven by antisemitism. The fact that the court has also indicted Vladimir Putin, Hamas and numerous African leaders will be brushed aside as the court and its European backers are tarred as Jew-haters.

The reality is that most European governments have done a lot to support Israel since the Hamas atrocities of October 7 2023. Britain and France recently took part in military action to protect Israel against Iranian missiles.

Some EU countries, such as Germany, are so committed to Israel that they may break with the ICC despite accepting the court’s legitimacy. But the instinct of most European nations will be to combine support for Israel’s right to defend itself with support for an international legal system that enforces rules of war.

The issues at stake go beyond the immediate question of possible war crimes in Gaza. Most medium-sized democracies in Europe and Asia understand the dangers of reverting to a world where great powers and their clients act with impunity.

Some breaches of international law, such as defying a ruling by the World Trade Organization, do not sound too terrifying. But Russia has already demonstrated that defying international law can also mean seizing territory, abducting children and slaughtering civilians.

The legitimacy of the international campaign to deter Russian aggression is based on international law, with the ICC case against Putin as a centrepiece. If America, which hailed the indictment of Putin, now turns on the ICC — and the international legal order that it represents — then the chances of persuading a sceptical world to enforce sanctions against Russia or Iran or North Korea are severely diminished.

The emerging clash between the US and its allies over Israel is part of a much broader argument about the future of the world order. John Ikenberry of Princeton University argues that Trump is turning the US into a revisionist state that is challenging every element of the liberal international order it once built: free trade, openness to migration, multilateralism, security alliances, solidarity between democratic nations and the protection of human rights.

The ICC is a relatively recent addition to the international legal system. It only began operating in 2002. The US, Russia, China, India and Israel are not among the 124 countries that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction. But deliberately destroying it will send a dangerous message — at a time when authoritarian powers are increasingly confident about waging war and committing human rights abuses.

As the world’s most powerful country, America may feel that appealing to international law and institutions is something that only wimpy Europeans need to do. But even the mighty US needs allies and global rules.

The coalitions that America is constructing against Russia and China are built around an appeal to international law. The US has used legal justifications to bolster its pushback against China in the South China Sea and Russia in Ukraine. Even the Russians and the Chinese always try to claim that they are acting in accordance with global rules. They know that openly violating international law loses a country allies and opens it to sanctions.

International law can be frustrating and its operation can seem inconsistent. But a world without law will be a frightening and dangerous place.

gideon.rachman@ft.com

Been playing this game for weeks. I completed it and then started a new game. The game's story is excellent, but it absolutely does not justify the tedium it makes you endure to experience it. In a 40 minute sitting, I'd spend the entire thing simply having characters dialogue at me. What's the point of the open world then? Car chases are scripted so that you don't even have to fire a single shot. The enemies will just eventually blow up. 70% of dialogue choices are just for roleplay and don't change a thing or make extremely minor changes. The combat and shootouts are mid.

Act 1 is a chore to get through on replay. There are so many touches they could have added to make it interactive. The Flathead robot mission... why not let us pilot the bot in first-person to do all the tasks, like a stealth minigame? I can think of a few games that let you do something similar. Instead, it is 20 or more steps that are essentially "look at this object and wait."

The best part of the game for me was the middle, where the plot becomes more elaborate, evocative and the relationships with Judy, Panam, Johnny etc develop. But even there the game was navigating me through a seedy open world in order to show me glorified cutscene after cutscene. Then shootouts that were really nothing special.

Witcher 3 was dialogue heavy, nuanced and compelling. It had tedium, but I never felt like the open world was superficial or that the tedium overshadowed the rest of the game. Side tasks like Gwent or contracts were fun and absorbing. The most boring expositional bit was using Witcher sense to explore, but even then at least you were interacting with your surroundings more, not just sitting there being talked at.

Did anyone else feel this way?

According to senior defense officials, the Israeli government is not seeking to revive hostage talks and the political leadership is pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of the Gaza Strip.

In closed-room discussions, these officials say the chances of reaching a hostage deal appear slim right now. One of the reasons cited is that since negotiations were suspended, there has been no discussion among international players involved in the talks.

In addition, they say, Israel's political leaders have not held any discussions with the various security branches about the condition of the hostages. Army commanders in the field who spoke with Haaretz say the recent decision to launch operations in northern Gaza was taken without any in-depth discussion. They said it appeared that the operations were aimed principally at pressuring local residents, who were again told to evacuate the area for the coast as winter is approaching.

It is possible that the operation is laying the groundwork for a decision by the government to put into effect the so-called surrender or starve plan of Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland. That plan calls for all the residents of northern Gaza to be evacuated to humanitarian zones in the south, with those choosing to remain deemed Hamas operatives and legitimate military targets. While Gazans in the south are getting humanitarian assistance, those who remain in the north will face hunger.

Defense officials who were asked to respond to the Eiland plan pointed out that it violated international law and that the chances of the United States and the international community supporting it were virtually zero. They said it would further undermine the legitimacy of Israel's entire Gaza offensive.

The Israel Defense Forces planned a wide-ranging operation in north Gaza after the collapse of the latest round of hostage talks, with the aim of pressuring Hamas to return to the negotiating table. However, Israel's war was soon redirected to the Lebanon front.

The 162nd Division, which had been operating in southern Gaza, was ordered to prepare a major assault on Jabalya refugee camp in the north, even though there was no intelligence to justify the move. The security establishment didn't unanimously back the move, and some in the army and the Shin Bet security service warned that it might endanger the lives of hostages.

Sources told Haaretz that when troops entered Jabalya, they did not directly encounter any terrorists. The person pushing for the operation was the head of the Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, before the first anniversary of the Gaza war.

Especially since six hostages were found shot to death after Israeli forces were approaching the place they were being held, the army has been warning that ground operations are endangering the lives of the 101 hostages remaining in Gaza. More recently, Hamas issued orders to its fighters to thwart Israeli rescue operations at all costs, including executing hostages if troops are approaching.

Intelligence officials estimate that before the war erupted, some 4,000 Gazans were known to be Hamas fighters, with an even greater number in the south. Even though Hamas' Rafah Brigade has been degraded and has ceased operating as an organized army, many of the fighters left the combat zone before the IDF entered, they said. They added that other Hamas fighters are operating from camps in the Central Gaza Strip, where the IDF has not yet been active. Meanwhile, Hamas dominates all civilian activity in the enclave. The defense establishment has urged the government to agree to some form of international governance for Gaza, but so far its appeals have been turned down. Hamas has formed a police unit called Arrow Force that numbers several hundred men. Its main task is to crack down on anyone opposed to Hamas rule. Hamas' greatest concern is that the difficult humanitarian conditions in Gaza will cause the residents to revolt.

Nevertheless, after a year of war, many Gazans believe that, once the fighting is over, the organization will remain in control and therefore fear speaking out against it. Until now, Hamas' efforts to prevent civilians from obeying IDF evacuation orders has not been successful because of the danger of remaining in evacuated areas. However, after being displaced from their homes several times in the past year, more and more residents are seemingly willing to take the risk of staying in combat zones.

The defense establishment sees putting an end to Hamas rule in Gaza as a much more complex challenge than the war itself. Senior officials say that even though it has been hit hard militarily, Hamas is still the only civilian authority in Gaza. If anything, the civilian population has become more dependent on the organization than ever, partly because it distributes humanitarian aid.