Trump’s Immigration Policy Isn’t Only Cruel, It’s Corrupt

Several companies and ultra-wealthy individuals that helped re-install President Trump stand to profit from ramped up ICE arrests.

The mega-bill President Trump signed into law last week allocates roughly $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next several years, including $45 billion for ICE to build new detention centers and $30 billion for other spending.

Since January, ICE’s show of force has been the Trump administration’s most visible and persistent expression of authoritarianism. Masked agents have detained legal residents, U.S. citizens, and public officials. The Trump administration has revoked the legal status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants; detained hundreds of Venezuelans and sent them to a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador; and shipped immigrants from Asian and Latin America to South Sudan. When Angelenos protested ICE, Trump sent in the military, and as tanks rolled toward civilians, ICE arrested Mario Guevara, a longtime journalist who has covered immigration, and as I write this, weeks later, Guevara is still one of the estimated 56,000 people currently in ICE detention.

All of this is a lot to witness, let alone experience. None of the available descriptions — xenophobic, harrowing, dystopian — really do it. Atlantic writer Adam Sewer titled his book The Cruelty is the Point, and that phrase often runs through my mind as I hear news of the latest escalation. The Trump administration’s anti-immigration crusade, and the corresponding attack on civil liberties more generally, is also an expression of something else: extreme corruption.

Several companies and ultra-wealthy individuals that helped re-install President Trump stand to profit from ramped up ICE arrests because they’ve secured lucrative government contracts or own stock in those contractors. According to a report from Open Secrets, at an expo of military equipment held in Phoenix in April, ICE’s Acting Director Toddy Lyons expressed interest in ICE contracting with private companies as much as possible, explaining that he wanted ICE to be more like a business, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

There are many companies and wealthy individuals that stand to profit from ICE’s expansion. I looked into three examples: First, Palantir, the tech company co-founded by Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, whose personal net worth is an estimated $20.3 billion and who once gave $15 million to JD Vance’s Senate campaign. Second, Geo Group, a private prison company whose former lobbyist rolls include current Attorney General Pam Bondi. Third, the contractors that built the so-called Alligator Alcatraz detention center, an open-air prison built to cage people in the Everglades.

First, Palantir, the technology company. Under Trump, Palantir has received a reported $113 million in federal government spending, plus a $795 million Department of Defense contract. In May, The New York Times reported that Palantir is potentially planning to build technology that would collect Americans’ personal information from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and store it in an unprecedented master database. Palantir is already expanding upon its surveillance system for monitoring immigrants. In April, the company received a $30 million contract with ICE to track immigrants’ movements in real time.

Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the main architect of Trump’s immigration policy, owns significant shares of Palantir stock.

Beyond the millions co-founder Thiel has funneled into Republican PACs, Palantir affiliates have spent enormous sums supporting MAGA campaigns that promised mass deportations. The tech giant’s employees contributed almost $5 million in the 2024 elections, including $1 million to both the super PACs Make America Great Again Inc. and MAGA Inc., according to the Open Secrets report. Meanwhile, in 2024, Palantir spent an estimated $5.8 million on lobbying the federal government. Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp, whose personal wealth is an estimated $12.4 billion, gave a significant donation after Trump was elected. In December 2024, Karp personally gave $1 million to MAGA Inc. and at least $600,000 to support Congressional Republicans. And then, as if that weren’t enough, Palantir co-sponsored Trump’s June military parade.

Next, Geo Group, the country’s biggest private prison and detention center company. According to a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy in Action, during the 2024 election cycle, GEO Group’s corporate PAC maxed out its contributions to Trump and contributed over $2 million in total to Republican PACs.

Donating to help reelect Trump has paid off for Geo Group’s founder and executive chairman George Zoley, whose wealth has more than doubled since the 2024 election, as GEO Group’s stock has skyrocketed. Geo Group and its centers across the country have been defendants in numerous lawsuits, including over wrongful deaths, labor violations, inhumane conditions, and abuse. And yet, the company continues to receive lucrative contracts. In February, ICE awarded Geo Group a $1 billion contract to open the largest ICE detention center on the East Coast, and it is projected to reap millions from transporting and surveilling more immigrants.

This is happening on the state level, too. At least three contractors that built the Alligator Alcatraz detention center have given money to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or the Republican Party of Florida for statewide campaigns, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The paper reports that the contractor CDR Maguire, an affiliated company, and its chief executives have given a combined $1.9 million to DeSantis political action committees and the state Republican Party.

There’s no way to wrap this up on a cheery note. When I think about Stephen Miller in the White House advancing his plans to surveil and detain millions of people while owning stock in a company that the federal government has contracted to carry out surveillance, I do, however, understand on a visceral level that working to root out political corruption is not an abstract issue, and it’s not something that can wait.