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.
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.
Anne Kim 