Anne Kim

The companies secretly profiting off ICE

Earlier this year, 55-year-old Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died at an ICE detention facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss, Texas. Officials claimed Campos had been “in distress,” and guards had been trying to help. But his death was ruled a homicide, the result of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Charges have yet to be filed; it’s unclear if an investigation is even pending.

That’s not the only peculiarity surrounding Campos’s death.

The detention center where Campos was killed was built by Acquisition Logistics, LLC, a private contractor with no experience building these kinds of facilities. Yet it won a whopping $1.2 billion contract to perform the work. Even stranger, the company has no website, and its official address is a “a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer,” according to the Associated Press. (See a photo here.)

Ten years ago, ICE’s annual allotment from Congress was less than $6 billion. But thanks to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed last summer, ICE’s budget has ballooned to $85 billion over the next four years, including $45 billion for immigrant detention.

The result has been a bonanza for what the Brennan Center calls the “deportation industrial complex”—the host of private contractors profiting from ICE’s nationwide rampage. Companies like Core Civic and The GEO Group, the nation’s largest private prison contractors, are gorging at the trough, as well as scores of anonymous upstarts like Acquisition Logistics, LLC. Oversight seems minimal, and transparency is almost nil.

Stock prices for Core Civic and The GEO Group surged after the 2024 election, in anticipation of the moneymaking to come. Core Civic’s shares, for instance, leapt from $13.69 in late October to $21.24 on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Last November, the company told investors that its third-quarter revenues were up 18 percentcompared to the same period in 2024.

Likewise, the value of GEO Group’s shares more than doubled, from $14.45 in late October to a peak of $35.35 the week before Trump took office. According to USASpending.gov, Core Civic has won more than $700 million in federal contracts for fiscal 2025 and 2026, while the GEO Group has been awarded more than $1.5 billion(not all of these sums are from contracts with ICE). In an earnings call for investors this week, The GEO Group reported winning $520 million in new contracts in 2025—“the largest amount of new business we have won in our company’s history,” according to company executives.

Stock prices for private prison contractor The GEO Group saw a noticeable spike after Trump’s election. Source: Yahoo Finance

Core Civic and The GEO Group are, at least, public companies with publicly traded stock, and federal securities laws require them to file quarterly reports on their financial condition (though Trump has said he’d like to end this requirement). This gives taxpayers some semblance of transparency into their operations and the magnitude of their dealings with the government.

More troubling are the private concerns like Acqusition Logistics, LLC, who are under no obligation to disclose their revenues from government contracting, how they’re spending their money, or even who their executives are. Databases like USASpending.gov provide only the barest glimpse of the vast cataracts of cash flowing to faceless contractors. For instance:

A Florida company called MetroIBR JV, LLC, was awarded $29.5 million in contracts from the US Customs and Immigration Service, the Office of the Secretary, and the Federal Acquisition Services for “custom computer programming services” related to “immigration examination fees” and “periodic censuses and programs” for the US Census Bureau. No details of these contracts are available. (The Trump administration has called for a citizenship question on the next census.)
A New York-based firm called Deployed Resources, LLC, won nearly $300 millionin new contracts from ICE, including for “operations and support,” and “security guards and patrol services.” A Texas Tribune investigation found that the company specializes in building tent encampments (such as after natural disasters) and is building border facilities for detainees. The Tribune also reported that the company has since been awarded nearly $4 billion in contracts from ICE—a figure not reflected in USASpending.gov.
Two mysterious firms—Louisiana-based People Who Think, LLC, and the Delaware-based Safe America LLC—have won more than $220 million in contracts to make ads for the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. People Who Think, which has no website, won an award for $77.1 million, while Safe America Media, which also has no website, won contracts totaling more than $142 million. According to an investigation by ProPublica, Safe America was created just days before the bid was awarded, and both firms have ties to Noem or her senior officials. Noem also invoked a “national emergency” to award the contracts outside the usual procurement process, ProPublica reports. “It’s corrupt,” one official told ProPublica.

A keyword search in USASpending.gov for “immigration” turned up 322 contracts for fiscal 2025 and 2026, including $60 million to Price Modern LLC (for furniture “to support enforcement and removal operations”); $2.2 million to Patton Contractors Inc. (to build out an ICE office in New Orleans); $607,000 to Wildflower International LLC (for fingerprint scanners); etc. etc. etc. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Regardless of their ideology, members of Congress should demand far more transparency from the Trump administration about the contracting practices and contractors involved in its ICE operations. Otherwise, the potential for waste—let alone graft—is vast.

One idea is to extend quarterly reporting requirements to private companies if a majority of their revenues come from government dollars. Under current federal securities laws, public companies are accountable to their investors and must disclose such “material” information as their revenues and liabilities, executive compensation, litigation, and other “risk factors” that might be of interest. Taxpayers, who are essentially “investors” in government contractors, deserve the same basic information. “Private” companies profiting from taxpayer money should be held accountable to the public in the same way that agencies are accountable to Congress (and in fact, contractors are almost always acting on behalf of agencies that have delegated to them their power).

Of course, transparency is only the first step; accountability and oversight are even more crucial. But given Trump’s penchant for secrecy and self-dealing so far, it’s going to be up to the public to demand the sunlight that will disinfect this administration.

This piece was originally published on the Washington Monthly’s Substack.

China Rising, America Falling

In a remarkable 2005 article for Foreign Affairs, Chinese party official Zheng Bijian first articulated to Western audiences the concept of a “peaceful rise” for China.

At the time, China was on the cusp of its emergence as a global power, and many US experts feared China’s aggression, both economically and militarily. Bijian’s essay sought to allay these concerns, arguing that China could ascend to “great-power status” in harmony with the international order, rather than in opposition to it.

Twenty years later, China has indeed attained its goal of becoming an economic superpower. In 2005, China’s GDP (in constant 2015 dollars) was only about $4.5 trillion, less than a third of America’s economic output. In 2024, its GDP had swelled to nearly $18.5 trillion, compared to $22.6 trillion for the US. Certainly, GDP is only the crudest of indicators of economic might, but there’s no denying China’s ascension.

Just in recent weeks, China has been racking up triumph after triumph, cementing its global stature. In contrast, the United States seems on the fast track to decline, ensuring not just China’s continued rise but its future dominance.

For instance:

Chinese universities grabbed seven out of 10 spots in the just-released Leiden Rankings, based on the quality and volume of scientific research. Harvard University fell to third from the top spot, while the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins were the only two other US institutions to crack the top 25. Chinese universities now produce 35 percent of all top journal publications, says a new NBER analysis, compared to 15 percent from US schools.
China recently announced the world’s largest-ever trade surplus of $1 trillion in 2025—achieved despite President Donald Trump’s double-digit tariffs on Chinese imports. American manufacturing output, meanwhile, contracted for the tenth straight month, and jobs continued to shrink.
Chinese automaker BYD is now the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs, selling 2 million cars in 2025. Tesla sales, on the other hand, slumped by 9 percent.
And in a brutal Et tu, Brute moment, Canada announced a new trade deal with China to lower tariffs on EVs, canola, and other products. (Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney also got a standing ovation at Davos this week with a speech condemning the “rupture” created by Trump’s policies and positioning Canada as a force for global stability.)

Trump’s embarrassing speech at Davos this week reassured no one that America can maintain its pre-eminence, and his policies will only accelerate America’s slide into second place.

His tariffs, for instance, have burdened American consumers while failing to stimulate domestic growth. Though Trump has touted his “trade deals” with other countries and their pledges to invest, nothing significant has materialized (and nothing, frankly, is likely).

Trump’s immigration policies have also robbed the nation of critical labor and talent, and the world’s brightest minds are settling elsewhere. New international student enrollment, for example, dropped by 17 percent last fall, while net immigration to the United States was negative for the first time in 50 years. The Brookings Institution estimates a net loss of jobs in 2026 as a result of the loss in migration, along with depressed consumer spending and GDP growth.

And as much as Trump covets Venezuelan oil, the future belongs to Chinese batteries, as author Dan Wang recently argued in The New York Times and clean energy expert Laura Gillam wrote for the Monthly. China has leapfrogged the United States in its clean energy investments, paving the way for future monopolies on clean energy technology. Trump, meanwhile, is waging war on windmills and pursuing a dead-end strategy to revitalize coal.

Trump is moreover destroying the seed corn of US competitiveness with his attacks on higher education and funding for scientific research. Though Congress appears to be rebuffing his plans for drastically slashing research, the pauses and cancellations of funding earlier this year have been hugely disruptive to researchers.

In the years before China’s rise, the United States’ hope was “containment.” Today, we’d be hard-pressed to compete.

This post was first published on the Washington Monthly’s Substack.

The GOP’s war on kids

Last fall, under Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico became the first state in the country to offer no-cost universal child care. Beginning November 1, the state eliminated income caps on eligibility for the state’s child care assistance program, opening it to all families regardless of their means.

Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani followed suit with their own extraordinary joint initiative: To deliver free child care to all children under five, beginning with two-year-olds in New York City.

Both efforts are revolutionary and deserve far more attention than they’ve received so far.

Free child care would be a godsend to parents who would otherwise spend thousands on tuition, and a blessing for kids who may otherwise not have access to high-quality early childhood education. It’s pro-child, pro-family, and pro-growth. Child care challenges cost the US economy as much as $122 billion a year in lost wages and productivity, according to the First Five Years Fund.

Republicans and the Trump administration, on the other hand, can only claim to be “pronatalist” and “pro-family.” Their policies have wreaked nothing but destruction on the health and well-being of America’s kids.

Robbing families of child care. In stark contrast to Hochul, Mamdani, and Grisham, President Donald Trump tried to block child care funding to five Democratic-led states as part of an alleged crackdown on “fraud” last week. (A federal judge called the move illegal.) An earlier announcement had threatened to block federal child care funding to all states absent proof that funds “are being spent legitimately.” Yes, isolated cases of fraud are a problem—and the result of poor governmental oversight—but Trump’s blanket accusation is a pretext for punishing blue states, with families as collateral damage. Whatever regulatory obstacles the administration ultimately imposes will make it harder for all families to access child care. Many providers could go out of business, thereby exacerbating already-dire shortages.

Jeopardizing children’s health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new vaccine guidelines, announced earlier this month, reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11—a “radical and dangerous decision,” as epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told NPR.

Among the immunizations removed from the list is Hepatitis B, credited with reducing the incidence of infection in babies and teens by 99 percent. Absent immunization, 9 in 10 infants infected with Hep B will develop a chronic liver infection, according to the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and as many as 25 percent of these patients will eventually die from liver failure. Also off the recommended list is seasonal flu, which has proved unusually virulent this year. North Dakota, for instance, just reported its first pediatric flu deathsin 10 years, and 17 children have died so far nationwide. Nevertheless, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK, Jr. recently told CBS News that it might be a “better thing” if fewer kids got flu shots.

The Trump administration’s anti-vax posture has already helped ignite measles outbreaks in multiple states. South Carolina, for example, is currently dealing with more than 300 cases, primarily among unvaccinated children. Expect these epidemics to become more frequent—and deadly.

Wrecking public schools. Trump’s administration has waged a systemic assault on public education, beginning with the dismantling of the Department of Education by executive order this spring. This summer, Trump also froze billions in federal education funds granted by Congress until bipartisan pressure forced him to release the money. His 2026 budget request demands steep cuts in education funding and zeroes out grants for rural education as well as programs like McKinney-Vento, which provides support to homeless students.

The massive budget cuts included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by Congress last summer will also ratchet up financial pressure on public schools. Billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, for instance, could force cash-strapped states to cover shortfalls by slashing school funds. Program changes will also pummel school budgets directly, according to the School Superintendents Association. Medicaid helps fund school nurses, psychologists, and services for students with disabilities, and less funding will mean fewer services for needy kids.

Trump’s greatest hostility is reserved for the children already most at risk: kids who are transgender, kids with disabilities, kids who are undocumented, or who have undocumented parents.

Like any schoolyard bully who targets the smallest child on the playground, Trump has unleashed his cruelest instincts on America’s most vulnerable. Among the many heartbreaking incidents this year was the March deportation of an 11-year-old girl with brain cancer, along with her undocumented parents. Advocates have asked for “humanitarian parole” so the girl could continue her treatment, but as of last fall, federal immigration authorities hadn’t even bothered responding.

If a society is judged by how it treats its weakest members, all Americans should stand ashamed.

This post originally appeared on the Washington Monthly’s Substack

Donald Trump’s Go-It-Alone America

President Donald Trump is a singular—and solitary—figure.

“I alone can fix it,” he solipstically declared in 2016, before his first presidential run. Now in his second term, he’s been a one-man tsunami, destroying decades-long global alliances, creating chaos in the global economy with his unilateral tariffs, and unleashing bitter partisanship domestically.

Like a kid locked in a toy store after midnight (or the drunken raccoon who recently trashed a Virginia liquor store), he’s gleefully demolished cherished institutions. He’s defaced the Kennedy Center by adding his name and bulldozed the East Wing for a garish ballroom. He’s trampled on the presidency’s traditional decorum with unhinged late night rants on social media. Especially appalling was Trump’s attack this week on the beloved director Rob Reiner, which led to rare bipartisan condemnation. Ever the narcissist, Trump turned Reiner’s tragic death into just desserts for Reiner’s opposition to the president’s policies.

We can blame our national habit of venerating iconoclasts, a tendency Trump exploited to leverage himself into office. We like to lionize the man who speaks out—the brave rebel who defies the establishment.

We revere the visionary genius of the solo entrepreneur and the pluck of the “self-made” billionaire. We mythologize the pioneer and the cowboy—the rugged, self-reliant men who tamed the West. It’s no coincidence that Tom Cruise’s world-saving hero in Top Gun has the call sign “Maverick.” Many of the presidents Americans most admire are the ones who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day and forged new paths for the country’s future: Lincoln, FDR, JFK.

But for every iconoclast, there’s a crank. For every visionary, a conspiracist. For every genius, a madman. After FDR, Trump. Idiosyncrasy becomes transgression, and defiance becomes insurrection.

Above and beyond the immediate and obvious wreckage of the last 11 months, Trump’s gospel of self-reliance has inflicted deeper wounds on America’s communal identity. Too many of us have been told that we don’t belong, are no longer welcome, or aren’t “American” enough. GOP policies, moreover, aim to erode the collective institutions that undergird our social fabric. In the selfish self-centeredness of Trump’s America, you’re on your own.

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Take, for instance, Republicans’ current opposition to Obamacare and the extension of premium subsidies for those who buy their coverage through this program. The great achievement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to transform the outrageously expensive and opaque individual market for health insurance into a collective enterprise—a marketplace that allows individuals to pool their risk with others and reduce their individual exposure. This is how insurance is supposed to work: The more people there are in the pool, the lower the costs for everyone.

The GOP’s refusal to extend premium subsidies will send costs soaring for millions of Americans, many of whom will now choose to go uninsured. The impact on the ACA marketplaces is obvious: Fewer people buying insurance means smaller pools and higher costs. This is turn could prompt even more people to drop out, leading to what health care economists call a “death spiral” for the ACA. The result could be a return to the individual market status quo ante, when nearly 50 million Americans—or 1 in 5 of the non-elderly—were uninsured.

What meager “solutions” Trump and Republicans have offered are also geared toward individual assistance, rather than shoring up the collective infrastructure of insurance. Trump’s idea to give people cash for health care would leave people on their own to pay for their care out of pocket. GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy’s amendment to this proposal, to expand individual health savings accounts, would do the same. Few Americans on their own can afford to protect themselves from the catastrophic expenses of a serious accident or illness.

Health insurance isn’t the only arena where the GOP is pushing ideas to undermine shared societal responsibility. Republicans love school vouchers, for instance, because they’re a backdoor mechanism for gutting public education. (See a related analysis by PPI’s Rachel Canter below.) And who needs Social Security when you can have your very own “Trump Account”? (Read my early critique here.)

Future presidents can restore the Rose Garden and rebuild relationships with the allies Trump has spat upon. But the larger project of collective national identity and mutual responsibility might take generations to repair.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders ditched the Articles of Confederation because they realized that a loose structure of individual states would make the forging of a great nation impossible. They understood that America is powerful when it’s united: In common purpose, with common values, and in collective regard for the common welfare. We can’t let Trump destroy that.

This piece was originally published on the Washington Monthly’s Substack

How regional inequality explains our polarized politics

Nearly 1 in 6 Americans lives in a “distressed” community.

Understanding who these Americans are and where they live could be the key to solving political polarization.

In this episode of the Washington Monthly podcast, I interviewed Kenan Fikri, Senior Fellow at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) about the Distressed Communities Index, a remarkable dataset that Kenan has curated for the last decade.

Watch, listen, or read the transcript here.

Adventures in “Credentialing”

Companies like Google, Meta, IBM and others offer students a chance to earn “professional certificates” online in topics such as data analysis, IT and online marketing. These classes offer convenience and affordability as well as the promise of career advancement.

But can they and other “credentials” available in the burgeoning certificates industry really help you land a well-paying job?

I explored the value of professional certificates in two articles for the Washington Monthly’s 2023 College Guide. In one piece, I provide an overview of the data available on wages and job outcomes for certificate holders. (The bottom line is that there isn’t nearly enough information for students to make good choices.) I also write about how I “earned” a certificate in data analytics and what this says about the problems with online programs.

A link to the full Washington Monthly College Guide is here.

Sharpest drop in college enrollment is among Black and Latino men

From 2019 to 2021, male undergraduate enrollment dropped by 10.2 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, compared to 7.8 percent among women. Among Black men, however, enrollment fell by 14.8 percent overall, and a whopping 23.5 percent among those enrolled in two-year schools. Latino male enrollment similarly slumped: by 10.3 percent overall and by 19.7 percent among community college students.

Train in Vain

Advanced College is a for-profit school in South Gate, California, a Los Angeles suburb that’s 95 percent Hispanic. Photos on Google Maps show a one-story beige building with a small parking lot. A banner on a car stereo store next door announces, “No Credit Needed.” Two doors down, there’s a crematorium, and across the street, a burger shop. Advanced College offers only seven programs, according to its website, including a credential in “computerized accounting” (tuition and fees: $13,573), a certificate in phlebotomy ($3,500), and a certificate in vocational nursing ($35,000).

The Department of Education’s College Scorecard reports that the school had only 31 students and a mere 52 percent completion rate as of July. And despite the name, just 43 percent of Advanced College’s students earn more than they would with just a high school degree. The school is under the dreaded “heightened monitoring” by the Education Department for “financial or federal compliance issues.”

Nevertheless, Advanced College is among the approximately 1,000 “eligible training providers” as of July 22 (and more than 5,700 programs) approved by the state of California to receive training funds under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the federal government’s largest workforce development program.

Why women and minorities leave STEM careers

I interviewed 25 workers with STEM degrees about the trajectories of their careers. The experiences of the women and minority workers I interviewed could not be more different from the experiences of the white men who spoke with me.

White men spoke of having mentors, robust professional networks and ample opportunities for advancement. Women and workers of color spoke of social isolation, disparate treatment and dead ends.

Is it any wonder that STEM fields continue to have a problem with diversity? Read more from my report for AEI here.