Deportation, Bribes and Big Money: The Corruption Behind America’s Racial Profiling Crisis

Corruption is Fueling the Trump-Era Deportation Efforts

“I was born here!” Jason Brian Gavidia said as ICE agents were pressing him against a fence near the auto body shop he runs just outside Los Angeles. ICE arrested and briefly detained him anyway. ICE also arrested his coworker and fellow American citizen, Javier Ramirez, a father of four, and detained him for days before he was finally released.

“I know enough to know this is not right at all,” Gavidia told The New York Times. “Latinos in general are getting attacked. We’re all getting attacked.”

During massive raids in Southern California this spring, ICE detained thousands of people. Immigrant rights groups sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging that the DHS had illegally and unconstitutionally arrested and detained people based on racial profiling to fulfill the Trump administration’s arrest quotas. The lawsuit alleges that federal agents arrested people without warrants, probable cause, or due process. A U.S. District Court judge ordered DHS to stop arresting people based on being in certain locations (like Home Depot parking lots or farm sites), speaking Spanish or accented English, or their race or identity.

This month, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket decision in the case Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, which said that, for now, ICE can arrest and detain people based on whether they’re speaking Spanish, look Latino, and are doing a job in an industry associated with migrant labor. That means that citizens will inevitably be pulled into the dragnet, just like what Gavidia and Ramirez went through.

The double standard couldn’t be obvious given MSNBC’s reporting that Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” accepted a $50,000 cash bribe during a recorded conversation with undercover FBI agents. Trump’s Department of Justice then shut down the investigation, according to the report. Meanwhile, according to Trac Reports, only 1.5% of new deportation cases pursued in 2025 have been based on charges of criminal activity beyond entering the country.

Legalized corruption is holding up Trump and Homan’s deportation system. Companies like the prison company Geo Group and the tech surveillance company Palantir have spent millions lobbying and donating to Republicans and now they’re profiting directly from lucrative government contracts to provide the infrastructure for the mass detention and deportation machine. As Democracy News previously described — in just one of numerous examples of the rampant corruption harming people — Stephen Miller, the architect of the mass deportation scheme, owns significant stock in Palantir. As I was writing this piece, news broke that people being held in ICE custody were shot and one was killed at an ICE facility in Dallas.

We don’t know exactly where this is headed for American citizens’ safety. The exact scope of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision and what it foretells about future federal law isn’t fully clear now, because the Court’s decision was brief and unsigned, with only Justice Kavanaugh writing a concurrence and Justice Sotomayor writing a dissent. But, as in 2021 when the Court used the shadow docket to permit Texas’s law SB 8, which effectively banned abortion well before Roe was overturned, we can reasonably expect that this ruling signals a future wherein all Americans have fewer rights and can expect more government surveillance and interference.

For non-white Americans, the situation is worse. Since Kavanaugh’s order was published, numerous legal experts have said that the order means that many non-white Americans can be under threat of arrest for going to work. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

“This is going to happen more now that everybody can see, including the ICE agents and the police who are helping them, that they’ve been given a green light,” David Harris, professor of law at University of Pittsburgh, told the Bloomberg Law podcast. “You can be in big trouble even if you have crossed every t and dotted every i and you were born here.”

“The Supreme Court’s order in Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo is best viewed not as law but as plain old white supremacy,” wrote Jay Willis of the legal outlet Balls and Strikes. “White people are not the ones being hounded for their freedom papers. They’re considered citizens by default, and, also by default, nonwhite people are considered others who do not belong in the country, and to whom the country could not possibly belong.”

It took a lot to get here. It took conservative billionaires funneling tens of millions of dark money into a network of think tanks and legal groups over decades. It took the Supreme Court issuing the Citizens United decision, from which our democracy has never recovered. It took Leonard Leo’s conservative and billionaire-funded network of organizations spending more than $55 million on Project 2025, after raising an estimated $250 million to remake the federal courts and installing a supermajority on the Supreme Court. And it took almost $15 billion in political spending during the 2024 campaign cycle.

It also took tech companies building platforms and algorithms that prioritize incendiary, reactionary, and, too often, false claims. It took giant media companies shapeshifting to generate hot takes and clickable headlines to satisfy their advertisers. It took hedge funds hollowing out local journalism.

And it took many years of anti-immigration advocacy. Back in 2010, Arizona passed what became an infamous “Show Me Your Papers” legislation, SB 1070. The bill made it a crime for immigrants to be in the state without authorization and required state and local police to ask people for proof of legal status if they had “reasonable suspicion” they might be undocumented. The Supreme Court threw out parts of the law but allowed the “show me your papers” piece to remain.

Looking back, what stands out now is that many businesses opposed SB 1070. The late U.S. Congressman Raul Grijalva called for a boycott of the state. There was so much negative national press over the state allowing racial profiling that Arizona businesses began fearing a boycott and argued against the bill.

Contrast that with today: Five years after companies from Apple to Netflix to Amazon were issuing Black Lives Matter statements, if there was any mainstream opposition to our highest Court legalizing racial profiling (beyond a few civil liberties groups suing), I missed it. Instead, Geo Group, Palantir, Stephen Miller, and many political groups working to keep Trump and JD Vance and the rest of the GOP machine in power are profiting by the millions and billions, because our campaign finance system lets them.