Immigration enforcement is not just a matter of policy—it’s a billion-dollar business. And behind the Trump Administration's rhetoric of “law and order” lies a disturbing truth: deportation-industrial complexes are not only profiting from human suffering, they’re bankrolling political campaigns that promise more of it.
At the center of this nexus is the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison and detention facility operators in the United States. The GEO Group has contributed over $1 million to pro-Trump political action committees, including $500,000 in February 2024 and an additional $500,000 split between August and September of that same year, through its subsidiary, Geo Acquisition II Inc.
Private detention giants, such as GEO Group and CoreCivic, have positioned themselves as indispensable partners in the federal government’s immigration crackdown. Their reward? Lucrative contracts, ballooning revenue, and direct access to the political machinery shaping our borders. Executives openly tout mass deportation as a growth opportunity.
“We believe that the private sector will play a critical role in assisting the government in carrying out its objectives,” said George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, during a November 2024 earnings call. “The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our country’s history and the opportunities that it will bring.”
This is not a partisan critique. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, these companies have thrived. During the Obama era, deportations hit record highs, and private detention firms quietly expanded their influence. Today, under Trump’s second term, they’re cashing in on a $170 billion enforcement bill that reopens shuttered facilities and doubles detention capacity. Eighty-five percent of detainees are now held in privately run centers.
CoreCivic has focused its influence at the state level, funding campaigns in Arizona and Texas, where immigration enforcement is aggressive and detention centers are concentrated. The revolving door between government and industry further entrenches this system, with former officials from ICE and DHS taking roles in private detention firms and shaping policy from both sides.
Yet behind the profit margins lie troubling allegations of abuse, negligence, and corruption.
Video shows violent confrontation at NYC immigration court
Video shows violent confrontation at NYC immigration court www.cbsnews.com
There was a violent confrontation at a Manhattan immigration court Thursday. City Comptroller Brad Lander says an ICE agent was caught on video pushing a woman to the ground moments after her husband was detained, but as CBS News New York's Ali Bauman reports, the Department of Homeland Security has remained silent about what exactly happened.
ICE enforcement has escalated sharply. According to the Deportation Data Project, daily detentions surged from 300 to over 1,000, disproportionately targeting Hispanics, Latinos in broad, indiscriminate sweeps. These aggressive tactics often bypass due process and sow fear across all immigrant communities.
The public response has been swift and emotional. Videos circulate showing children sobbing and parents being taken into custody, prompting widespread protests and tense confrontations between federal agents and local residents. Immigration lawyers warned that such tactics discouraged migrants from attending court hearings, undermining the integrity of the legal system.
CoreCivic’s South Texas Family Residential Center—once closed due to cost concerns and the death of a toddler—is being reopened. No accountability. No reform. Just recycled trauma under a new contract.
Tom Homan—former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and now President Trump’s Border Czar—was the subject of a federal bribery investigation. The probe stemmed from a 2024 FBI sting operation in which undercover agents, posing as business executives, allegedly recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash inside a restaurant takeout bag. In exchange, Homan reportedly suggested he could help secure immigration-related government contracts for their companies if appointed to a senior role in a second Trump administration.
We cannot accept a system where masked ICE agents detain undocumented immigrants who are overwhelmingly law-abiding members of our communities. These are not the “most dangerous” individuals the Trump administration claims to pursue—they are our neighbors, our coworkers, our loved ones. Parents. Caregivers. People with deep roots and no criminal records. Yet they are treated as fugitives, their lives upended for the sake of political theater.
But there is a way forward—if we’re willing to confront the architecture of exploitation and build something better.
We must:
- End private detention contracts. Public facilities, while imperfect, are subject to greater oversight and democratic control. Legislation like the “Justice Is Not for Sale Act” offers a path. Cities and counties can also refuse to issue permits and cooperate with ICE.
- Invest in community-based alternatives, such as case management programs, legal aid, and housing support. These models are more humane, more effective, and far less expensive.
- Enforce transparency. Subpoena power, independent monitors, and whistleblower protections are essential to exposing abuse and preventing cover-ups.
- Decouple campaign finance from enforcement contracts. No company profiting from detention should be allowed to fund the politicians who expand it.
When immigration policy is driven by profit, migrants become revenue streams, abuse becomes a line item, and democracy becomes a pay-to-play system where campaign donations shape who gets detained, deported, or discarded.
This is not enforcement—it is erasure. The political spectacle is prioritized over substance, and the human cost is buried beneath campaign slogans and billion-dollar contracts.
We must choose differently. Because when democracy is sold to the highest bidder, we all pay the price. And when we allow cruelty to become currency, we lose more than policy debates—we lose our moral compass.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network. Balta is the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.