Private prison firm CoreCivic gave $500K to Trump’s inauguration, highlighting industry’s support
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(NEW YORK) — Private prison company CoreCivic reported in a lobbying disclosure that it donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee in December, underscoring the close relationship between President Donald Trump and the private prison industry.
As ABC News has previously reported, CoreCivic and private prison company GEO Group, both which have both long supported Trump, saw their stock prices immediately spike after Trump’s victory in the November election.
The industry is expected to grow under Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
On his first day back in the White House, Trump reversed former President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order that eliminated DOJ contracts with private prisons.
Both CoreCivic and the GEO Group donated to Trump’s first inaugural committee in 2016, with a subsidiarity of each company donating $250,000, according to past inaugural disclosures.
Several top executives at CoreCivic and GEO Group have also been longtime Republican and Trump donors, Federal Election Commission records show.
Representatives for CoreCivic did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Among other Trump-Vance inaugural committee contributions disclosed in new filings, the Florida-based HVAC company Carrier Global Corporation donated $1 million in what records suggest is the company’s first major political contribution.
Chemical company Syngenta Corporation, now owned by China National Chemical Corporation — known as ChemChina — gave $250,000 to the committee in what was its first inaugural donation in recent years.
The Coca-Cola Company gave $250,000, after giving to both the Biden inaugural committee and Trump’s first inaugural committee, and identify verification company Socure gave $100,000.
Overall contributions to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee set an inauguration record by surpassing the committee’s $150 million goal, boosted by $1 million donations from several major tech firms including Meta and Amazon.
(LOS ANGELES) — The workers union representing Starbucks baristas across the country announced members in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle will go on strike in the days leading up to Christmas.
Workers United, which has unionized more than 525 U.S. Starbucks locations, said in a press release Thursday that unfair labor practices and stalled negotiations with the company are the catalyst behind the holiday season strike.
The union says five days of escalating strikes will begin Friday and continue until Dec. 24 in “three of the company’s priority markets” during what it called the company’s busiest days of the year.
During the strike period, the walkouts “are expected to spread each day and ultimately reach hundreds of stores from coast to coast by Christmas Eve” unless the company honors a February commitment made with the union.
In February 2024, Workers United and Starbucks announced they would work on a “foundational framework” to reach a collective bargaining agreement for stores, something the union says has not come to fruition.
In a statement on Thursday following the strike announcement Starbucks said Workers United delegates “prematurely ended” its bargaining session with the coffee giant this week.
Starbucks added that the company is “focused on enhancing” employee experiences by offering an average wage of $18 per hour and benefits including health care, free college tuition, paid family leave and company stock grants.
“We are ready to continue negotiations to reach agreements,” Starbucks said, adding, “We need the union to return to the table.”
Workers United, however, said despite “repeatedly pledging publicly” that it intends to reach contracts by the end of the year, Starbucks has not yet presented workers with a “serious economic proposal.”
“Nobody wants to strike. It’s a last resort, but Starbucks has broken its promise to thousands of baristas and left us with no choice,” Fatemeh Alhadjaboodi, a five-year Starbucks barista and bargaining delegate, said in the release.
“In a year when Starbucks invested so many millions in top executive talent, it has failed to present the baristas who make its company run with a viable economic proposal. This is just the beginning. We will do whatever it takes to get the company to honor the commitment it made to us in February,” Alhadjaboodi added.
“The holiday season should be magical at Starbucks, but for too many of us, there’s a darker side to the peppermint mochas and gingerbread lattes,” Arloa Fluhr, a bargaining delegate who has worked off and on at Starbucks for 18 years said in the release.
“I’m a mom of three, including my daughter who is diabetic. I know what it’s like to panic because my hours were slashed and I won’t be able to pay my bills and could lose access to healthcare, including my daughter’s insulin. That’s why we’re steadfast in our demands for Starbucks to invest in baristas like me,” Fluhr added.
ABC News’ Zunaira Zaki contributed to this report.
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(WASHINGTON) — On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump announced some energy and environmental policy priorities that represent a stark departure from U.S. climate policy under former President Joe Biden.
His professed policies include a declaration of a “national energy emergency,” a rollback of the previous administration’s vehicle emissions standards — which were released last March — and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which is a major international agreement intended to reduce the impacts of global warming.
On energy Trump said during his second inaugural address Monday afternoon that he will declare a “national energy emergency” during his first day in office and “drill, baby, drill.”
“We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
The U.S. became a net energy exporter in 2019, during Trump’s first term — a status maintained under the Biden administration. In 2024, the U.S. reached an annual record of 13.2 million barrels per day of crude oil production, according to the Energy Information Administration. Last week, the EIA forecast additional growth for U.S. crude oil production this year in its most recent short-term energy outlook.
America is also already the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas, according to the EIA. The Biden administration paused the approval of additional LNG export facilities last January, with several project proposals awaiting approvals at that time. Ahead of the inauguration, the Trump administration said that it intended to undo this pause and expand LNG exports further.
On EV standards Trump also said Monday that he would “end the Green New Deal” and “revoke the electric vehicle mandate,” in a statement that references Biden-era rules from the Environmental Protection Agency regulating tailpipe emissions from both standard and heavy-duty vehicles.
“With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”
Trump’s comments misrepresent the Biden-era rules, which were not a mandate for automakers to manufacture electric vehicles and did not require Americans to buy any specific type of car. The standards, released in March 2024, established an average of allowed emissions across a vehicle manufacturer’s entire fleet of offered vehicles. They affected only newly manufactured cars from model years 2027 to 2032.
At the time, Biden administration officials emphasized that there were multiple pathways to compliance with the new tailpipe standards, including the use of improved internal combustion engines, hybrids and fully electric cars.
On the Paris climate accords In a press release, Trump also said he would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Day 1 — a move that would make good on one of his campaign’s promises.
The Paris Agreement was originally ratified at the annual United Nations Climate Conference (also known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP) in 2015. It intended to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels — a metric scientists believed would significantly reduce the impacts of climate change.
The world exceeded this metric for the first time in 2024, which was the warmest year on record according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
During his first term in office, Trump withdrew from the agreement; however, Biden re-entered it on his first day in office. The Biden administration implemented a slate of policies meant to address the country’s contribution to climate change and help mitigate emissions.
Both priorities are widely expected to change under the new Trump administration.
With another withdrawal, it seems Trump renders moot the Nationally Determined Contribution released by the Biden administration last month. That NDC, required by the Paris Agreement to be updated every five years, claimed the U.S. was setting a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions more than 60% by the year 2035.
(EDGEWATER, Fla.) — A woman called 911 to report a toddler left alone in a vehicle outside a Florida bar before the mother of the child and her boyfriend were arrested for child neglect, according to newly released audio.
The Edgewater Police Department released the audio of the 911 call along with the body camera footage Monday of what they had called a “disgusting” incident.
The child’s mother, 35-year-old Kristina Vitucci, and her boyfriend, 39-year-old Joshua Harris, were both arrested after Vitucci’s 2-year-old daughter was left in an unlocked vehicle while they sat inside an Edgewater bar drinking for nearly two hours on Jan. 28, according to police.
“I don’t know that there’s an actual emergency, but there’s a baby out here in a car by itself,” the 911 caller can be heard telling the dispatcher.
“I just don’t want anybody to get mad at me. But I just, you know, this is wrong,” the caller said.
“Yeah, I agree,” the dispatcher said.
An officer responded at approximately 8:15 p.m. and reported that the child had been crying in the vehicle and it was unknown where her parent was, according to the body camera footage.
Upon arriving at the vehicle a few minutes later, Harris told officers that he owned the car and that the child’s mother was inside the bar, the body camera footage shows.
When Vitucci subsequently came outside of the bar to the parking lot, an officer told her, “You’ve got an idea of why we’re here,” the footage shows.
“Yeah, she said.
The officer told Vitucci her daughter was fine and to stay with him, as police continued to question the couple about the incident.
They were both arrested for child neglect, a third-degree felony.
Vitucci is scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 18 and Harris on Feb. 25, court records show.
ABC News has reached out to their public defenders for comment.
