How Political Corruption Paved the Way for Rising Authoritarianism

Today there's a National Shutdown to protest ICE.

Today, across the United States, there’s a National Shutdown to protest ICE. As the call for no school, no work, no shopping, says, “It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough.”

When in September the United States began bombing boats in the Caribbean, killing civilians, and justifying what international groups called extrajudicial killings by claiming without evidence that the civilians were gang members and drug dealers, it was possible to anticipate that one day soon, within our borders, this Trump Administration would kill civilians and justify its actions by maligning and dehumanizing the dead. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern observed on the Amicus podcast soon after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, the poem we learned as children, “First They Came,” has “probably outlived its usefulness,” because many of us do not seem to grasp that what is done to others can be done to us. Even so, who could see that video of federal agents holding down Alex Pretti and hear what Secretary of Homeland Kristi Noem said to justify his killing and not feel dread for what could become of anyone should this administration continue this course.

The full ramifications of the Trump Administration’s escalating violence are beyond the scope of this one newsletter. Today I’m going to focus on one corner of the problem: How political corruption paved the way for rising authoritarianism, and how that same corruption is enriching a small cohort of rich individuals and companies that are profiting from ICE’s operations. This political corruption takes many forms — from classic pay-to-play deals to nepotism and even cash bribes. And in the starkest way possible, it illustrates how money in politics has dire real-world consequences for real people.

First, although it may seem obvious, we have to remember how President Trump and this Republican Congress got elected in the first place. The cost of the 2024 federal elections that installed this current administration was $5.5 billion. Just 100 extremely wealthy families gave a record-breaking $2.6 billion; dark money groups that do not disclose their donors spent another unprecedented $1.9 billion. Those wealthy donors must have been motivated by the idea that if they elected Republicans, they’d get their tax breaks, and they did — to the tune of $1 trillion in tax cuts to the top one percent. But Republicans didn’t run on promises to give tax breaks to billionaires. That wouldn’t work.

Instead, from the debate stage, JD Vance spread lies about Haitians, and at Madison Square Garden, the Trump campaign hosted what can only be described as a white nationalist rally. Republican candidates for Congress spent millions on political ads that falsely maligned immigrants. According to a Washington Post analysis, during just the first six months of 2024, $247 million was spent on TV, streaming, and digital ads that mentioned immigration, and the overwhelming majority were negative ads run by Republicans.

Those ads used stock images and language describing immigrants as violent. In reality, immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than people born in the United States. The majority of the political spending that funded campaign ads that depicted the border as a place of chaos and violence was directed to non-southern border states like Ohio, Indiana, and Montana, where Republican candidates won.

Some of the donors that gave to Trump and Congressional Republicans sought more than the tax breaks, massive as that windfall became. Many major donors for Trump also stood to benefit from lucrative contracts under a second Trump Administration.

The example of CSI Aviation, a longtime government contractor, illustrates how Republicans’ accelerating mass deportation campaign is also a form of deeply entrenched political corruption. The company’s CEO, Allan Weh, is a large Republican donor who has given over $1 million over many years. Then, when during the 2020 election Trump began a pressure campaign to encourage supporters to deny the results of the election, and electors tasked with certifying the election falsely claimed that Trump had won, Deborah Maestas, a CSI Aviation director (who also happens to be the CEO’s daughter) was one of those fake electors.

Fast forward to the 2024 campaign, when Weh gave $300,000 to support Republicans and just days before the election, CSI Aviation hosted a rally for Trump at an aircraft hangar in Albuquerque, where Trump called immigrants “killers” and “drug addicts” and “gang members.” Then, in 2025, once Trump was in office, CSI Aviation received $1.2 billion in federal contracts. The company is now one of the largest private ICE contractors. It runs flights shuttling immigrants who have been detained to prisons and out of the country. This is a big business as more immigrants are being detained and flown from their home states to prisons in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere, sometimes on numerous flights over many days.

Trump supporters and allies— including senior officials and members of Congress — are personally profiting from private companies’ government contracts at nearly every stage of the deportation system. As Democracy News covered previously, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and architect of Trump’s mass deportation system, owned significant shares in Palantir, the technology company that has a $30 million contract with ICE, before he dumped those stocks and several others in defense contractors after receiving scrutiny for conflicts of interest. Today, at least nine sitting members of Congress have traded a collective $1.12 million in Palantir stock.

That’s not all. Forbes recently listed the private companies that have the largest contracts with ICE, including Palantir, AT&T, Dell, Motorola, General Dynamics, L3, FedEx, Comcast, and Charter Communications. According to an analysis by End Citizens United, sitting members of Congress traded at least $6.8 million in those companies’ stock just in 2025, as the Republican-controlled Congress actively expanded ICE funding.

I want to emphasize, because this shouldn’t get lost: Current members of Congress — elected officials who in the coming days will be voting on ICE funding — collectively trade millions of dollars-worth of stock in private companies that provide services to ICE. In other words, members of Congress are literally bought into ICE, and that’s allowed, and it will continue to be allowed, until Congressional stock trading is banned.

Then there are the private prison companies and their lobbyists. Let’s just look at one example, Geo Group, the private prison company that is valued at $2.25 billion. Geo Group spent nearly $1.4 million lobbying federal lawmakers, and during the second Trump Administration, federal lawmakers have awarded the company and its subsidiaries more than $1 billion in contracts to run detention centers and related services. In 2024, the company and its PAC spent at least $3.7 million on federal elections, contributing to Republican committees and PACs.

And don’t forget: Border Czar Tom Homan accepted a $50,000 cash bribe in a paper bag from undercover FBI agents, after promising them a lucrative contract, and then, after Trump took office, federal prosecutors dropped the case. Beyond everything else she’s done, Noem hooked her friends up with a $220 million contract to make anti-immigrant ads. And, of course, President Trump has been accused of numerous crimes.

The scale of the political corruption propping up the Republican’s anti-immigrant campaign is difficult to process. And the gravity of what we’re all witnessing– what many people are enduring firsthand– defies any tidy resolution here. Right now, what I’m hanging onto is the knowledge that people in Minnesota and in every state across the country are summoning the courage to say enough is enough.