The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s first year back in office has been the brutality of his deportation machine and his administration’s numerous attempts to upend due process. Back in March, the Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. Ábrego Garcia’s legal status protected him from deportation to his home country for fear of persecution.
“I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process,” says Ábrego Garcia’s attorney Benjamin Osorio. “There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers. And the same thing in immigration: This guy had a lawful order protecting him from being removed from the United States, and the government violated that.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Osorio about Ábrego Garcia’s case. After months of being shipped around detention centers, he is free and fighting deportation orders from home with his family. “I think the courts have probably never seen more immigration habeases in their life.” says Osorio. “In the habeas sense, I would think that Kilmar’s case has had a lot of effect in the immigration practice.”
Ábrego Garcia’s story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda and for that reason his story has become a political flashpoint. But what’s less understood is the scale and scope of fulfilling the administration’s vision of mass deportation.
A new investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research called “Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” maps out a vast web of companies that make up the rapidly growing deportation economy, how we got here, and the multibillion-dollar industry driven by profit, political power, and a perverse incentive structure.
“The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 was a pivotal moment. It was a major restructuring of immigration, and that was also a point at which the framing of immigration went from more of a civil matter to more of a national security concern,” says Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare. “And with that transition, the amount of money and contracts began to flood in.”
Gauri Bahuguna, deputy director of research at SITU, adds, “It was in the Obama administration where the detention bed quota comes in, and that’s really the key unit of measurement that drives this particular part of the immigration enforcement industry, is ‘How much money can you make per detained individual?’”
“Even though the bed quota is gone formally from the law there, it still exists in contracts with companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group,” says Bahuguna. “There is payment for detaining a certain number of people, whether or not the beds are occupied, and then the perverse incentive to keep those facilities filled because there’s an economies of scale.” McBride underscores that the current immigration system is “treating people as these products and units and to maximize profit.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.
The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s second term so far has been the brutality of his deportation machine, from masked agents tackling people in the streets to shipping people off to prisons in far-flung countries.
The Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador back in March. But last week, a judge’s order finally freed him.
Kilmar Ábrego Garcia: [Speaking in Spanish]
Interpreter: I stand here today with my head held up high.
AL: That’s Ábrego Garcia speaking at a press conference after his release, joined by advocates and an interpreter at his side.
KG: [Speaking in Spanish]
Interpreter: Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws, and I believe this injustice will come to its end.
AL: Ábrego Garcia is now back in Maryland with his family and is continuing to fight deportation orders. His story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
Joining me now to update us on Ábrego Garcia’s case is one of his lawyers, Benjamin Osorio.
Benjamin, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Benjamin Osorio: Thank you.
AL: Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — custody last Thursday. To start, can you tell us how he’s doing since his release?
Benjamin Osorio: He’s pretty tired. I don’t know if you saw when he went to go check in with ICE that morning, it looked like he hadn’t slept. I think he’s exhausted from the whole process. He’s bounced around from being deported in March to detained at CECOT — obviously, he’s much happier to be out of CECOT and back in the United States. But then, re-detained again, briefly out for a weekend, back in ICE detention, and then now out.
He’s ecstatic to be with his family, but at the same time, I mean, he’s still limited in what he can do and obviously still facing federal charges.
AL: During the press conference when he spoke after his release, during the segment where an advocate and a pastor are speaking, you can see him visibly getting emotional. It seemed like he was tearing up. Has this episode changed him?
Benjamin Osorio: I didn’t know him before, so it’s hard to say whether it’s changed him, but again, somebody having been through what he has been through, I don’t know how it could not. At this point, if I was him, I would just want resolution to everything and not be in detention.
AL: Back in March, Ábrego Garcia was detained by ICE in Baltimore, as you’ve mentioned, and then within a few days he was sent to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador. What can you tell us about his experience in CECOT?
Benjamin Osorio: Well, it’s been reported, so this isn’t anything confidential or of that nature. But he was taken off the plane and beaten — that’s sort of their welcome greeting — was beaten as he was taken off the plane. And then their heads were shaved.
They were basically beaten on a daily basis, from what it sounds like. They were put on their knees for long periods of time, and if you passed out, you were beaten. They were not allowed to go to the bathroom — many of them urinating on themselves, defecating on themselves.
He would talk about, in the middle of the night, you would hear people screaming out for help and nobody doing anything. The lights on 24/7 — blinding lights. Sleeping on all metal beds: no sheets, no pillows, no nothing like that. So it doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience.
AL: How did that compare to his experience at the ICE detention facilities that he was shuffled around to?
BO: He’s been segregated from everybody else, so not the same group housing that you would typically find in ICE. But being in solitary and only interacting with other individuals for certain hours of the day also has a detrimental effect on your morale and psyche.
AL: Of course, yeah.
BO: ICE conditions aren’t good, but again, better than CECOT.
AL: Can you remind us, for people who might not know the full story, from the beginning of this ordeal, what happened to him? What was the process? Why was he moved to these different centers, and what happened there?
BO: Since he’s been back in the United States, he was paroled back in when he was brought back in. He’s been shuffled back and forth between both immigration and criminal custody. So that’s been one of the reasons that he’s been moved back and forth. He was taken out to Tennessee, staying in a Putnam County Jail there, while they were arraigning him on the federal charges and then figuring out whether he was going to be released on bond.
Once he was released on bond, he was then re-detained by Baltimore [Enforcement and Removal Operations] and then taken down to Farmville [in Virginia]. The judge in the federal district court case had ordered him to be kept within 200 miles, and then they transferred him from Farmville to Moshannon detention center [in Pennsyvlania]. And that’s where he was released from recently.
AL: Can you talk a little bit about the legal strategy of these dueling, federal attacks against him — both on the immigration front and the criminal front — and how that complicated his situation?
Benjamin Osorio: I guess, let’s talk about the three-front war, right? So he’s got an immigration case, which is pending before the immigration court.
He then also has the habeas case, which — even though he’s out now — continues because of some of the things that have happened in the immigration case that’s taking place in the federal district court in Maryland. And then he’s got the criminal case taking place in federal district court in Tennessee. So he’s got a criminal defense team working on the criminal case.
He also has us, who are partnered with Quinn Emanuel working on the district court litigation. And then he has us just working on the immigration court litigation.
“Typically before the Trump second administration, you were not seeing these third-country removals that you’re seeing now.”
So it’s kind of messy, but what he was granted before is called withholding of removal. Typically before the Trump second administration, you were not seeing these third-country removals that you’re seeing now.
So if you won withholding of removal, they can’t remove you to your home country, but they can remove you to a third country. So let’s say that he has this protection from El Salvador, they were not supposed to have been able to send him to El Salvador, but they could send him to Mexico, to Honduras, to Guatemala as part of these third-country agreements. They could do that.
He would be a very visible candidate for them to try to go after to do that. We feel that we also were fighting the immigration case to try to normalize his status, get that back reopened, and adjust his status. Now when they paroled him back into the United States, they also created some new immigration options for him as well, potentially applying for asylum because he’s back within one year of having entered the United States, but also he’s married to a U.S. citizen.
So now that he has a lawful entry back into the United States, he could potentially adjust status through her. So it’s messy. And obviously, the government has put the full force of DOJ and DHS behind it to try to make an example of him.
“The government has put the full force of DOJ and DHS behind it to try to make an example of him.”
AL: You mentioned like his particular circumstances made him the perfect target for this administration and what they’re trying to do.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that and how his case became a flashpoint in this administration’s immigration policies. This was the case that finally pushed Democratic senators to say, “We’re going to go and visit these detainees,” people who have been removed. Why did that happen?
BO: I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process, right? There’s a reason that if somebody that we all know goes and commits a murder, they still get a trial. We don’t summarily execute them unless they’re a danger to the police officers arresting them or anything else like that. There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers.
And the same thing in immigration: This guy had a lawful order protecting him from being removed from the United States, and the government violated that. And so the Constitution is designed to protect us from the government. And so here is the government violating somebody’s due process, violating the Constitution.
And I think that’s why people cared about it. I don’t think it was necessarily about Kilmar, or his specific person — or it’s not about whether Kilmar is a good guy or a bad guy. It’s about, the government owes a responsibility to do the right thing,
AL: The order to release Kilmar — a federal U.S. district judge in Maryland said that federal authorities lacked a legal basis for continuing to detain him. Has his case changed anything in your view, as far as how judges are handling other similar cases, or how the administration is approaching targeting people like Kilmar?
BO: Yes. The federal district courts probably are not fond of how many habeas we filed. But there’s been a change in bond rules too. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this. In September, there was a case that came out from the Board of Immigration Appeals called Matter of Yajure Hurtado, and it basically tries to change the rules to make so many people ineligible for bond.
Because they were trying to change the rules without actually going through Congress to change the law — which actually governs statutes and mandatory detention and who’s eligible for bond — we started filing a ton of habeases. And so I think the courts have probably never seen more immigration habeases in their life.
“ I think the federal district courts probably are not fond of how many habeas we filed.”
Like I said, they’re probably sick of it, but at the same time, they’ve been great and fast-acting on these habeas. Sometimes a habeas, a normal habeas, could pin for a while. But they’ve been great on ordering either the immigration courts to hold a bond hearing and find a head jurisdiction or beyond that ordering these people released. So in the habeas sense, I would think that Kilmar’s case has had a lot of effect in the immigration practice.
AL: What’s next for Ábrego Garcia after his release? Obviously, you mentioned his pending cases.
BO: It’s hard to say. We’re still in the middle of briefing both before the immigration side of things, both at the immigration court level because the immigration judge just issued a new order the other day, and then also before the Board of Immigration Appeals.
And then because of some of the acts that the board and the IJ have taken — the immigration judge — have taken, now Judge [Paula] Xinis has ordered an additional briefing on the [Temporary Restraining Order] right now in federal district court.
Look, I was shocked. People were asking us when we first started if we were going to be able to bring him back. And then I was kind of shocked that Xinis found that he didn’t have a removal order. It’s not something I would’ve predicted in the beginning. But then when there was that hearing a couple weeks ago, and she was talking about there not being a valid order because he was ordered removed to Guatemala.
I mean there’s been a lot of different turns here. I think it’s hard to predict what ultimately happens. Like I said, if I’m him, I just want to be out and I want to be with my family, and if that means it’s in Costa Rica or whether that’s here in the United States as long as I’m not detained, I would be happy.
AL: Any final thoughts? One thing I would ask maybe if you want to elaborate on is this idea that it doesn’t really matter what kind of person it is when we’re talking about these cases. Like, what matters is the statute and the constitutional protections that are here. And that’s completely at odds with how the administration has framed all of this — that the people it’s going after are criminals who deserve whatever’s coming to them. I think that’s an important distinction, but if there’s any other point that you touched on that you want to elaborate on?
BO: I just think it’s funny. I hear different officials go on TV and they say, we’re going after the individuals who are breaking the law, or we’re going after the individuals here who are here unlawfully. But there have been many cases where they are making the people unlawful.
So when they take away Temporary Protected Status from people from Haiti and Sudan and from Venezuela, these countries that have ongoing crisis in them, they made them undocumented. And when they say that we want people to do things the right way — look, Congress passed Section 208 [of the Immigration and Nationality Act] and made asylum a lawful pathway. Asylum is a lawful pathway to get status here in the United States.
Now, if Congress wants to change the laws, that would be well within their right to do. But until they do that, their attempts to block asylum-seekers and their attempts through different regulatory changes or through the Board of Immigration appeals to whittle away asylum and go after victims of domestic violence — I don’t know, to me, that’s not the American way, and it’s sad that our government is targeting some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society.
AL: What else is on your docket right now?
BO: It’s pretty crazy, the number of detentions has obviously picked up pretty significantly, and that’s sort of my specialty, is detained removal.
“Our immigration system is broken.”
It’s just very sad because I see so many families — and families of people with U.S. citizen spouses and families of people with U.S. citizen kids — getting ripped apart. People always ask me, they say, “Why don’t people just do it the right way?” I have friends who are not immigration lawyers or, I’m from Georgia, I have a lot of friends who have maybe very different views on immigration than I have, and they’re like, “They’ve been here for 20 years. Why haven’t they fixed their status?” And I’m like, “Our immigration system is broken. I don’t think you understand like how complicated it is for somebody who’s been here 20 years.”
Even if they have a U.S. citizen spouse, if they have more than two entries, they might be subject to a 212(a)(9)(C) and be subject to the “permanent bar.” That means they have to stay outside for 10 years — away from their U.S. citizen spouse, away from their U.S. citizen kids.
“People don’t understand like how much damage we’re doing to future generations of Americans.”
And then I have other things, where people are active members of this community. I have a family I represent that the U.S. citizen spouse works for a local school board, and they have two small U.S. citizen kids. And it’s sort of complicated, but at one hearing where the judge was ordering him removed, even though we won later on appeal and he’s still here — a 7-year-old girl’s coming up to me. And I have 6-year-old twins. So she’s about my kids’ age, and she’s asking me, “When is Dad going to come home?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
And so I just think people don’t understand like how much damage we’re doing to future generations of Americans. I don’t think people understand how much damage we’re doing to the economy. I don’t think people understand how much damage we’re doing to the American brand here.
AL: Thank you so much for taking the time, Ben. We know you have a lot on your plate, so we really appreciate it.
BO: Thank you.
AL: After a quick break, we’re going to zoom out and talk about exactly who is profiting from the Trump’s deportation agenda, and take a closer look at what has become a rapidly expanding and lucrative industry. We’ll be right back.
Break
AL: Welcome back to The Intercept Briefing. The militarization of U.S. borders and immigration policy is a project that’s been long in the making.
Bill Clinton: We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of law.
George W. Bush: We’re going to get control of our borders. We’re going to make this country safer for all our citizens.
Barack Obama: Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws.
Unknown: President Obama has deported more undocumented workers than President Bush did.
Donald Trump: And we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.
AL: The violent immigration raids we see in communities across the country today could not have happened without the bipartisan efforts of past presidents — those who paved the way for an insatiable immigration bureaucracy and an unhinged administration ready to take it over.
As of November, ICE is detaining more than 65,000 people, a historic high, according to The Guardian. Under the guise of protecting national security, officials have transformed U.S. immigration over the last two decades into a cash cow for private corporations. Today, Trump’s deportation machine takes up more than half of all federal law enforcement spending. And Trump’s marquee spending bill raises that to 80 percent.
Democratic senators just released a report that found that the Trump administration diverted $2 billion in Pentagon funds to target immigrants, as our colleagues Nick Turse and Noah Hurowitz reported earlier this month.
A new investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research maps out this vast web that comprises the deportation economy: how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry shaped by private profit, political power and a perverse incentive structure. Joining me now to talk about this industry are some of the folks behind the project.
Tyler McBrien is the managing editor of Lawfare, a nonprofit publication covering law, national security, and foreign policy.
Tyler McBrien: Thanks for having me, Akela.
AL: And we’re joined by Gauri Bahuguna, a computational designer and deputy director of research at SITU Research, a visual investigations practice in Brooklyn, New York.
We’ve worked with SITU on reporting on reconstructions of police responses to protests, it’s great to have you on.
Welcome, Gauri.
Gauri Bahuguna: ?Thank you for having me.
AL: To start, for both of you, what drove you all to do this project? What did you feel was missing from the public’s understanding of how the system works?
GB: This project actually began as far back as 2023, and at the time we were interested in expanding the notion of immigration enforcement beyond the border. So at the time we were looking at the various, the physical, the digital, and the political infrastructures that create this everywhere border, so to speak.
And from there, obviously, the election last year was a huge point for us to track and study. The industry part came up in our research of how and why this immigration enforcement seems to be a growing hot- button issue.
“We were interested in expanding the notion of immigration enforcement beyond the border.”
TM: What we are trying to do with this project is to make visible an entire system, as much as that’s possible. All the facets of the immigration enforcement economy — be it detention, deportation, surveillance, and interdiction — because I’m sure listeners can relate, the past year has just been this feeling of jumping from fire to fire. And you can easily miss the forest for the trees.
We wanted to highlight not just these big-name companies that people will be familiar with — the Palantirs, the Googles, even maybe the GEO Groups, the private prisons — but also smaller companies that do food service or IT services that make up these web of contracts for ICE and DHS.
AL: Tyler, that’s a good segue because we know that this is obviously a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s agenda, but there’s been a bipartisan effort to build up this machine since long before he first took office, which really accelerated when George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and ICE after 9/11. But what other figures helped drive that expansion prior to Trump? How did we get to where we are today?
TM: The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 was a pivotal moment. It was a major restructuring of immigration, and that was also a point at which the framing of immigration went from more of a civil matter to more of a national security concern. And with that transition, the amount of money and contracts began to flood in because of this “higher echelon” issue of national security versus civil enforcement.
2002 was a pivotal moment, but like we said, it was building before that. We really try to convey that in the videos — of having not only Trump on the campaign trail promising the biggest deportation campaign in history, but also dating back to Bush, of course to Bill Clinton, and before.
Just to also back up, the framing that we wanted to put forth was that of the military–industrial complex, and throw out this provocation that we may be seeing an immigration–industrial complex following the same dynamics.
“The framing that we wanted to put forth was that of the military–industrial complex. … We may be seeing an immigration–industrial complex following the same dynamics.”
AL: Gauri, can you talk about the main ways that this deportation economy operates?
GB: It was in the Obama administration where the detention bed quota comes in, and that’s really the key unit of measurement that drives this particular part of the immigration enforcement industry, is “How much money can you make per detained individual?”
And for now, even though the bed quota is gone formally from the law there, it still exists in contracts with companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group, where there is a minimum quota that ICE must fulfill in order to be in contract with these companies. And any detainees above that minimum guaranteed daily population, they get discounts on.
So there is payment for detaining a certain number of people, whether or not the beds are occupied, and then the perverse incentive to keep those facilities filled because there’s an economies of scale.
TM: This is another, I think, motivation behind the project is to highlight not only the ideological and political motives of the current immigration system — think Stephen Miller’s vision — but also the profit motive driving this perpetual system. And the upshot of it is something that Gauri just touched on, which is treating people as these products and units and to maximize profit there.
AL: Can you talk more about this incentive structure and who is profiting?
Like you mentioned, everyone knows Palantir, GEO Group, CoreCivic, and you mentioned there’s some other names that people may not be as familiar with playing a significant role there. But yeah, I’m curious to hear more about who is actually profiting.
GB: The main profiteers are those large private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, because ICE has different kinds of facilities that range from completely owned and operated by ICE to agreements with the marshals, and then completely contracted detention facility centers.
And because of the pricing structure offered by these private companies, it is the lowest price per night per detainee in private detention centers. However, ICE will often work with local and state governments, who then subcontract out to these private companies to detain populations. So what happens is that almost or close to 90 percent of all of the detainee population are held in private prisons because it just makes that much more economic sense.
TM: As Gauri said the biggest ones are the private prison contractors. I think the biggest single contractor is GEO Group, which listeners will probably be familiar, but they’re also smaller firms. In surveillance, we have the big names like Google, Palantir, Clearview, but there are also smaller companies, like BI2 Technologies. There are investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard.
In the video, we have this map that shows just this web of companies. But I think what was really interesting in doing this project was to come to realize that this analogy between the military–industrial complex and the immigration–industrial complex was sometimes not so much an analogy as just the extension of one into the other.
So some of these firms are the same. You have Northrop Grumman, where you have big weapons manufacturers. You have gun manufacturers that are also benefiting.
AL: Because they’re arming the guards?
TM: Exactly. And arming for some of the immigration raids, so for example, Operation Midway Blitz.
AL: Does the incentive structure that you were talking about, Gauri, does that have the potential to limit future avenues for policy change on immigration? And is that already happening? Like the idea that the incentives are built around the fact that this economy already exists and it needs to continue existing or else it’ll be bad for the economy, and does that make it harder to unwind this machine?
GB: That’s an interesting question. I think because these are being detailed in the contracts themselves, I would imagine, it is something that could be addressed and there could be safeguards against having these types of quotas. Because again, it is just another expression of the detention bed quota, and they did successfully get that repealed.
AL: But the idea that like, even though they repealed that, it’s still part of this structure. Like, the economy is operating with a mind of its own, like outside of the policy sphere.
TM: I think that’s the dynamic that we’re warning that is already happening and will continue to happen and further entrench.
So if you think about detention, for example, which is the first chapter of the video that we put out. Often companies like GEO Group will have idle facilities that were just a red line on their balance sheet. And now there’s this huge incentive to get these idle facilities up and running — fill the beds.
And then the way that it can become entrenched in that community, for example, is then that creates some jobs. And it’s this perverse choice between an economic boon to the local community in some small way versus not having those jobs. And so, you can see how these incentives — these just pure economic incentives — can just keep driving the machine as you said.
AL: This is obviously very linked to the broader phenomenon of mass incarceration in the U.S. and the push and pull over cutting the number of people that we have behind bars outside of the immigration system. Did that come up at all in this project? Are there characters or actors who play a major role in building up the carceral system who also play a role in this system? We know private prisons, GEO Group and CoreCivic, are a big part of this, but obviously they don’t incarcerate the majority of people in the U.S. But I’m curious how this came up, if at all, during your research and how you think about the nexus between the U.S. prison system and immigration detention.
GB: Yeah, absolutely. They’re so closely tied together because GEO Group, their facilities are both, again, they’re private prisons and also immigrant detention facilities. I believe some of the private prisons were then converted into detention centers. And now because there is this tipping point where there’s just so much more money in this immigration enforcement, you see other actors [are] moving toward that.
“The myth really that it creates jobs for local people was something that we found to be not necessarily true in our research.”
I also just wanted to note that the myth really that it creates jobs for local people was something that we found to be not necessarily true in our research. And one of our colleagues actually took a road trip through America and visited a lot of these towns that were in close proximity to these facilities. And because of the stop-and-start nature, so sometimes they would be filled, so the detention center was operational, so there were a few jobs given out. Then it would shut down, so they would all lose their jobs immediately. And more recently, with the immigration detention facilities, because of language requirements, they were not even hiring people from the neighboring towns.
So it’s not even that there was a direct benefit to the community.
AL: That’s really interesting. Did they interview people who lived in the town or where, who were they talking to?
GB: Yes, pretty much people in the local watering hole. This is the facility that is also mentioned in the video in Michigan, one of the GEO Group idle facilities that was just recently opened, and I believe it’s the largest immigration detention center in the Midwest. So he was speaking to a lot of people in small towns around that detention center, and they all expressed similar sentiment.
AL: I also just want to touch on this idea that ICE and CBP have really exponentially increased the amount of power and influence that they have over not just immigration policy, but our government in general.
“ Two small agencies that were intended for a very particular purpose have pretty much become the face of the government at this point.”
There’s been so much great reporting on just how much money has been diverted from other parts of the government, or how many agents have been diverted to these agencies to sort of power this machine.
But I wonder, can you talk about that phenomenon? Like, these two small agencies that were intended for a very particular purpose have pretty much become the face of the government at this point.
TM: Yeah, I guess I don’t want to overstate something that I said earlier about the profit motive and the economic factors driving all of this/ That’s a fear, and something that we’ve been seeing that is driving policy. But of course the political and the ideological motives are also driving this.
You see this in the national security strategy that was just released by the administration — that border security and controlling immigration is the national security threat. So you see it elevated in the political arena as well. And then it’s not just the administration. You have Congress to thank for the exponentially higher billions that are flooding into DHS and ICE, who can then award the contracts to these companies.
GB: It’s the result of decadeslong lobbying campaigns, right, to push for these harsh immigration laws. So I think there’s definitely the political angle, and also because of how CBP and ICE are allowed to operate, which is slightly different from other law enforcement agencies; they have a lot more leeway. Border Patrol, for example, they have a 100-mile radius within the U.S. border, that they can stop people without a warrant and just question them. I think these types of extra powers make it easier for the conversion or the misappropriation of a military force, so to speak.
TM: And just to add one point to what Gauri said about lobbying. If you take GEO Group, for example, their PAC, according to FEC filings, was the first to max out donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
AL: On this point about this being part of the national security strategy and this lobbying apparatus, this is also a strategy that Trump and his allies want to push beyond the U.S. and into Europe, for example. Can you talk a little bit about that, how the Trump administration is essentially lobbying to export this around the world, export this system around the world?
TM: Yeah. I can speak to one aspect of this. Take the video that we put out on detention. We broke it down into three ways in which the detention economy works. One is permanent facilities. We talked a lot about private prisons. One is temporary or soft-sided facilities. But the third that we cover — as a sort of form of outsourcing or contracting — is “alternative jurisdictions,” as we call it.
So think El Salvador, CECOT. Think the talk about detaining migrants at Guantánamo Bay. And then of course the system of deportation, these third-country removals, these are transactional often in nature, in terms of what a country would economically benefit very often from receiving migrants from the United States.
We wanted to expand the idea of what a contract could be or what this transaction could look like beyond just the U.S. government and a private company in the US. It’s really more expansive than that.
AL: Can you talk about how you compiled this project? I know a lot of the information was public or open source, but tell me about your approach. Where did you start?
GB: So the first step was to identify who are the main actors within this economy. And that was identified through looking at the budgets and the contracts that you mentioned. This is open-source information.
And then after that, we really wanted to understand further how this is exploding as a way. So I think looking for the details within the contracts that really jumped out, like the tiered pricing, for example. And then moving into now, how do you put this all together and visualize it? And I think that’s where we started being a bit more experimental with our research. And so one example is the parametric tool that we use to visualize deployed resources, which is one of the soft-sided detention facility contractors.
So just trying to visualize what detention at this scale means because I don’t think that’s something that is particularly present in most of the conversations. So it was a combination of trying to find and really parse through these government contracts and all of this jargon. And then translate it into a way that was, again, paints this picture of it being beyond the border and located to other geographies within the United States.
TM: On this parametric tool. I think Gauri and some of her colleagues at SITU really helped understand projections and what these big numbers and big promises would actually mean.
“What do these massive numbers mean and what will they continue to mean?”
What that gets at is just the reason for contracting in the first place. The government just doesn’t have the capacity to find, detain, and deport the numbers of people that they are setting as a goal. And sometimes not even the single facility or single company that are contracted to do something can do it, which means that there likely will be more contracts and more money going into it.
So I think that’s one thing that the SITU team really helped me visualize at least, was, what do these massive numbers mean and what will they continue to mean?
AL: Tyler you brought up Stephen Miller earlier. Obviously we’re going to have to talk about him at some point. Top White House adviser Stephen Miller is widely recognized as the brains behind Trump’s deportation agenda. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had this great piece about his vision earlier this week. He wrote, “Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post-World War II era.” I really encourage people to go read this because they interview Miller’s family members and go into like this book that his family member wrote about the immigration apparatus, like when they came to the U.S. Anyway, very interesting.
But can you guys talk about Miller, his vision, and how that’s coming to life under Trump’s second term — and how that deviates or doesn’t deviate from lthe post-9/11 vision of this system?
TM: I haven’t read the piece, and I can’t believe you’re asking me to crawl into Stephen Miller’s mind. [laughs]
AL: Sorry, someone has to. [laughs]
TM: I would go back to what I was saying in the past answer, where the way to achieve the scale at which Stephen Miller wants to deport and relocate people again is only achieved through a massive expansion of contracts. And that’s why the funding bill was so material to this.
AL: You’re talking about the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
TM: Exactly, yeah. So I think Stephen Miller and even the Trump administration as a whole can announce that they want to hit these benchmarks, but it’s then these contractors who come in.
GB: Yeah, I agree with what you said but also wanted to acknowledge the very prominent white nationalist undercurrent of his vision.
AL: Yeah.
GB: And I think that we can see that play out in how the language of how to describe migrants is very dehumanizing, “illegal aliens.” And it’s just rife with xenophobia in every news coverage.
And I think that is moving the country toward a more, or less tolerant overall perspective of what migrants are and specifically which migrants are “good” and worthy of being in this country. And I think that is probably the most scary part of his vision coming to life.
TM: Yeah, it’s a great point. We were constantly asking ourselves what part of this system we have today is continuity and what part is rupture. And I think to Gauri’s point, I mean that the rupture is just the destruction of any sort of refugee program, save for white Afrikaners from South Africa, is just a nakedly, racist policy. I think there’s just no other interpretation.
AL: You’ve both mentioned this capacity issue — Miller and Trump have these quotas that incentivize these policies, but maybe don’t have the capacity to fulfill that vision, even though they’ve been very successful at it so far. But this brings up this notion that I heard a lot prior to Trump’s election. Policy people and reporters who cover immigration were saying, “Not that this is overblown, but take it with a grain of salt because there is no capacity to do what they’re saying that they want to do.” We’re obviously seeing that not really be borne out right now. But even if there isn’t capacity to achieve their goals, does it matter because of how much they’ve already been able to do? Obviously by diverting money, resources, and agents from all of these other departments, but despite all the handwringing over capacity, like this is still obviously happening in full force.
GB: I don’t think it matters that much both for the base that they’re trying to appeal to and also the corporations and individuals involved in this large scale operation. What happens is that yes, it’s completely impossible for them to meet the targets they’re setting for themselves, but in doing so, they create like an urgency and that’s when more of these regulations start to dip and drop.
[White House border czar] Tom Homan, for example, has already been calling to reduce the detention standards in ICE facilities, if it’s not permanent facilities, and we go into the tents. And then within the tents again, how much more can you pack in so you squeeze more profit, reduce the living conditions of these places, and then you have a lot more to show for that’s closer to this target, but whether or not they ever reach, it doesn’t matter to the people affected.
AL: Right. I want to mention another piece that was recently published. Above the Law published this story about ICE, perhaps, inadvertently, posting a “watchlist” of immigration lawyers. We know the administration routinely attacks its perceived enemies, including immigration attorneys. What do you make of that and how the administration has gone after the legal system to power its agenda?
TM: Yeah, I think it’s a clear attempt to reduce the friction that they face in the immigration system. And often that friction is happening in the courts. Some of the biggest administration immigration stories of the year have been about these high profile deportation cases. Kilmar Ábrego García, for example, Mahmoud Khalil, of course. You’re seeing the strategy deployed across other issue areas too. It’s the flip side of the capacity — they’re building out capacity while also trying to reduce the barriers, and most of the barriers are legal ones.
AL: Right.
GB: Even just in the geographic distribution, it’s again, trying to set up these obstacles for accessing legal counsel. So that’s very intentional, right? They’re extremely rural areas where most of these facilities are. It’s very difficult for people to be in touch with lawyers in facilities like Alligator Alcatraz; there was no access at all.
So I think there is this both contempt and disregard for the law, but also intentional fear of limiting access.
AL: Given where we are today and how big this deportation economy has grown and how deeply it’s spread its tentacles into all of these other sectors that we’ve touched on, is it possible to unwind this and what would that take?
TM: It’s such a hard question. Like I said earlier, we throw out the analogy to Eisenhower’s military–industrial complex farewell speech. I think it’s safe to say that his warning went unheeded, and the military–industrial complex only increased exponentially. Which is one of the reasons we wanted to shift this new warning that, you know, maybe it will be heeded this time.
But it is worrying to me because I think you contrast the current moment to the first administration, first Trump administration, where there were sometimes successful worker-organized protests, for example, especially at tech companies. After contracts with ICE were made public, workers came together to protest and sometimes those contracts were canceled. I feel like you’re not seeing the same dynamic here. There is, I guess, some power in the consumer base and if consumers are made aware of companies or investments that they are a part of that are also being used to detain and deport people often illegally, then perhaps there’s some sort of pressure point there.
AL: And this reminds me, we didn’t even talk about this. The first anti-ICE protests that we saw under Trump [this term] brought the first National Guard deployment that we saw. And now I feel like people don’t even really — he’s deployed the National Guard to so many cities that people don’t necessarily connect that to that being an effort to tamp down on opposition to this deportation machine.
GB: That actually connects quite well to what I’m about to say, which is I am a little skeptical about whether the toothpaste can be put back into the tube just because of how deep these roots have gotten into every part of our daily lives. And so the first pieces were about detention, and we’re going to do one on deportation and interdiction. Then the final one is a data surveillance piece. And I think that is really, that’s where so much money — like far beyond what the deportation and detention is estimated.
I think this data surveillance piece is what will ultimately also impact citizens most directly, right? It’s being tested on migrants and then slowly, as you mentioned with the National Guard, it just creeps into daily life and becomes normalized. So I think just because of the, and we see that the large tech companies are also embedded into this administration, so I just feel like we’re moving towards a very dark point of no return.
AL: Thank you for using the toothpaste and the tube analogy, because I think that is a perfect analogy for this. It’s not only impossible to do, but it’s very messy. Thank you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. This has been a great conversation on a depressing topic, so we really appreciate it.
GB: Thank you.
TM: Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
AL: We’re going to add a link to the SITU and Lawfare series in our show notes and on our website. Really encourage you all to check it out. It’s fantastic work and more to come in 2026, so hopefully we will talk more about that then.
That does it for this episode.
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This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.
Happy holidays, and happy new year.
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