The Mass Deportation Economy

The constant criminalization of immigration and the villainization of immigrants over three decades led us to where we are today

Photo by Annika Gordon on Unsplash

Reports highlighting how many migrants are being crammed into already overcrowded facilities, and their inhumane treatment, expose a little-talked-about motive: The economics behind the inhumanity. An approach that builds upon preexisting systems of oppression and state-sanctioned violence. The undeniable aspect of this is just how high white power structures jump to profit from the exploitation and intimidation of humans.

The surveillance systems that monitor everyone in the US, not just the “illegal immigrant” straw man, are also hugely problematic. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the agencies under its umbrella have access to data collected not only by each DHS agency but also by local and state law enforcement agencies and private companies. The latter allows the agency to skirt various constitutional protections because the argument is that DHS is purchasing public data. That information is then shared up and down the chain through Fusion Centers, where “intelligence” can be accessed by local, state, and federal agencies.

“Fusion Centers are state-owned and operated centers that serve as focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT), federal, and private sector partners.” - Department of Homeland Security

Private corporations also fuel the incarceration and inhumane treatment of migrants and migrant children and deflect blame from the government. This creates a built-in economy, accounting for tens of thousands of jobs that most lawmakers and the people depending on those paychecks will undoubtedly balk at eliminating. This economy is bolstered by outrageous funding, such as the $175 billion allocated for DHS in 2025, alongside years of increased funding and support from both Republicans and Democrats since the agency was created in 2003.

So let’s take a look at the many major beneficiaries of that funding that are fueling the mass deportation machine and benefiting from the hate perpetrated against immigrants, Latinos, Black people, and now, protesters. To get an understanding of how smaller, more localized companies and private equity profit from all of this, look here and here. You can also see the extent of just how many smaller contractors there are on this map.

Incarceration

Several companies have long offered services related to migrant detentions. Each of those companies brings with it a reputation of inhumane treatment, including a lack of food, clean water, clean clothes, showers, adequate medical care, or even beds to sleep in. Despite many of these facilities being over capacity, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are pushing the current system to the brink by flooding it with more detainees who, more often than not, are not criminals, according to ICE’s own data.

CoreCivic, GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, and Management and Training Corporation (MTC) are the primary operators of ICE detention centers who are profiting greatly from the Trump administration’s racist targeting of nonwhite communities. A new company with no experience in the prison industry, Acquisition Logistics LLC, was awarded part of a contract worth about $1.2 billion, along with Disaster Management Group, to build a detention center at Fort Bliss, another location with a troubled past dating back more than 100 years. By September 2025, Fort Bliss had 60 violations of federal standards for immigrant detention in just 50 days.

Let’s also not forget the ancillary services that are part of the incarceration machine, such as airlines and transportation services. One provider, Avelo Airlines, recently ended ICE deportation flights as DHS considers creating its own airline service for deportations.

What’s happening here is decades old, and since the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, which opened the door to the creation of the private prison industrial complex, the companies involved have found more ways to profit from the intentional suffering of others by influencing legislation through campaign contributions, lobbying, and outright corruption. The latter became much more obvious in 2025 under Trump.

Surveillance

Many articles have been written, and stories have been told about the surveillance systems employed by ICE; data collected doesn’t simply stay with a singular agency. Instead, it’s shared through the aforementioned Fusion Centers and can be accessed by any law enforcement agency in the country. The data can then be used to create a profile of someone that may be wholly inaccurate, thus subjecting them to potential repression by the police or by federal agents.

Reports of officers and agents abusing these systems are rampant. Creating profiles, such as what DHS did to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, happens to millions of people in the US through gang databases that falsely label people as members. Creating a profile of the victim of a police shooting, much like DHS is doing to Renee Good after an ICE agent killed her, is also common. Government agencies, with the help of news outlets, have done it to Indigenous people, Black people, Latinos, and various other racial and ethnic groups for centuries. It’s always done to shift public opinion to help rationalize extrajudicial murder.

“From 2017 to mid-August 2022, HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] issued more than 170,000 custom summons for data, all without judicial oversight,” reads a report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Among these summonses, HSI sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas, surveillance footage from a major abortion provider in Illinois, state university health records services, student elementary school records in Georgia, and data from a Lutheran humanitarian aid organization supporting refugees. These summonses have also been used to target journalists.”

Much of this data is purchased from corporations such as Thomson Reuters’ now inactive CLEAR database, which granted access to more than 218 million utility customers. Palantir offers the Immigration OS platform and services that integrate vast databases, making profiling citizens much more efficient. The platform allows ICE to use facial recognition alongside other data to streamline identifying targets. While all of this is presumed to be used for immigration enforcement, it has become apparent that it is used for much more.

Booz Allen Hamilton, which I identified in 2024 as a contributor to Project 2025, has a contract to support and maintain ICE’s data repository, RAVEn. General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense contractor, provides services that include background investigations. LexisNexis, a data brokerage firm that collects and shares publicly available information on citizens and noncitizens alike, shares data with ICE to track vehicles and collect information on people.

Other firms in the tech field that offer various services are AT&T for IT and network services, Dell, which offers Microsoft enterprise software, and Motorola, which provides ICE’s tactical communications infrastructure. CACI International provides tactical communications operations and maintenance under its contract, and L3Harris Technologies provides the equipment to locate targeted mobile devices. Amazon Web Services hosts databases and provides cloud services that support ICE’s data and surveillance operations.

Historical Context

These systems are what the United States is. Throughout history, we’ve seen the surveillance of various groups happen. Many will argue that those days are gone, but they are not. Everything from police brutality to mass incarceration to hunting humans because they’re nonwhite people is simply a modernized version of the same white-centered attacks on nonwhite groups. The whitewashing of history, the villainization of various populations of people, and the violent attacks against them are all foundational to the chronology of the United States.

Hateful rhetoric, whether coded or not, against immigrants and Indigenous, Black, and Latino communities has a long and sordid history. However, over the last three decades, those ideologies have taken a different tone, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The targets then were Black teenagers who were labeled “super-predators.” That racism got uglier after the election of Barack Obama and the incoming Tea Party, which dominates Republican politics today. It was a level of blatant racism and extremism that led many Republicans to retire.

Similarly, more covert Latinophobic rhetorical attacks on immigrants were happening during the Obama era. This didn’t get much attention largely because anti-Black racism was so prevalent, and the economy was on the heels of the “Great Recession.” However, the targeting of immigrants was already set in stone by Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, after 9/11. Bush built upon immigration reform legislation under Bill Clinton, and Obama used both sets of laws to conduct his slightly more covert mass deportation operations.

While Clinton, Bush, and Obama all further criminalized immigration and helped create the lawless agencies we see today, it was Donald Trump who took things a giant leap further with nothing short of Klan- and Nazi-like targeting of nonwhite people. During his first administration, Trump targeted Black people as much as he did Latinos and immigrants. That evidence is undeniable when looking back at Trump’s targeting of Black Lives Matter with coded language and outright anti-Black racism, alongside espousing hateful rhetoric about Latinos.

In his second term, that animus only manifested into even more hate for nonwhite groups.

Meanwhile, mini economies built on oppression are flourishing off of that hate and billions in government funding. Not only are corporations reaping massive rewards from capitalizing on hunting other humans, but tens of thousands of people have become dependent on those salaries, making systematic oppression and an attempted ethnic cleansing like a heroin addiction. This is where oppressive polices have historically left a society, reeling from the outright brutal attacks on non-white groups while also rationalizing why it should keep doing it.

You see that in the commentary, suggesting we “need” these agencies but that they should act accordingly and within the limits of the law. The problem with that logic is that if DHS or ICE operated mostly within the boundaries set by the Constitution, they could no longer operate in secrecy as they do now, highlighting precisely why we don’t need them at all. We already have myriad agencies that do that. The most obvious is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

But when companies like Bank of America provide banking services to many of the groups mentioned here, and the biggest names who stand to profit are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, South Aftrica’s weirdo Elon Musk, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, along with the CEOs of many other corporations, you can expect stronger pushback from them than anyone else. Wealthy elites have always funded the worst atrocities in US history, and many of our fellow citizens have also jumped at the chance to profit.

Those parts of us have never changed.

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I’m an independent journalist digging deeper into the stories you see or don’t see on the news. Find my work at Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, Orinoco Tribune, and more. I’m also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a donation via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.