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).
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.