The US Immigration Industrial Complex is a Threat to Everyone

In November 2024, following his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump officially announced that Tom Homan, former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, would join the incoming administration as “border czar.” Homan, however, did not wait for this official statement from the president-elect, nor did he even wait for the election to take place at all before making his own statement: Months earlier, at the National Conservatism Conference in July 2024, Homan said, “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

Homan’s public confidence that he would secure a prominent position in immigration enforcement in the future Trump administration apparently extended to private conversations as well — particularly those discussing deals. In September 2024, during a meeting with two men he believed were business executives, Homan reportedly accepted a Cava bag filled with $50,000 cash from them in exchange for his promise to help them win government contracts if Trump should return to the White House. Discussing the business of immigration enforcement was not out of the ordinary for Homan. Since 2018, he had run Homeland Strategic Consulting, which on its website touted past work with the Homeland Security, Defense, Justice departments alongside the following statement: “We have a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”

Unfortunately for Homan, these prospective clients were, according to reports, undercover FBI agents who recorded the entire exchange. Had the transaction been real and not a sting, that $50,000 down payment likely would have fetched quite the return on investment for the aspiring government contractors looking to get a piece of the multi-billion-dollar industry. Homan, for his part, has denied any wrongdoing. In any case, such schemes are mere symptoms of a larger ailment, one that had long festered but became supercharged when Trump retook office and Congress approved more than $170 billion of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” to fund his administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown. 

Now, more than a year into that crackdown, the prognosis looks more dire than ever. According to the American Immigration Council, 2025 was the deadliest non-COVID year on record for ICE detention, as the number of detention facilities doubled, number of detainees on any given day rose by 75%, and the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on a given day exploded by 2,450%. The people inside those facilities have reported abysmal, unsanitary conditions, routine denial of medical care, frigid holding cells, and other horrors. Between 80 and 90% of ICE detention facilities are run by private contractors. Other functions of immigration enforcement — surveillance, interdiction, and deportation — have similarly high levels of outsourcing to private companies, along with similarly harrowing reports of abuse and mistreatment. Meanwhile, private contractors (such as the largest detention companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic) have reported record-high profits. 

As it turns out, many of the companies now securing these lucrative contracts were some of the largest donors to Trump’s election campaign and lobbied Congress to triple ICE’s budget. The system that incentivizes this kind of apparent quid pro quo parallels one President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of during his farewell address over 64 years ago. Worried by what he saw as a postwar “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” in his last opportunity to use the bully pulpit, Eisenhower urged his fellow Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Were Eisenhower alive today, he may have swapped out the first word to rail against a related specter threatening America’s present and future: the immigration-industrial complex.

The immigration-industrial complex is not a brand new concept, though it’s not exactly a household term either. It should be. As we argue in “Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” a new series of short investigative videos from Lawfare and SITU Research, US immigration enforcement has evolved into a rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar industry in which profitability increasingly dictates policy and enforcement priorities. Much like a military propped up by fortune-seeking mercenaries, an immigration system reliant on profit-driven private actors means less oversight, more abuse, and incentives aligned to perpetuate current problems rather than find their solutions.

The comparison between a military- and immigration-industrial complex is so apt that military contractors, arguably the foremost experts in the military-industrial complex, took notice of the business potential in the adjacent border security industry ahead of Trump’s second inauguration. In January, a group of military contractors pitched the incoming administration on a $25 billion proposal to help fulfill the Trump campaign’s promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. One of those contractors, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, explained that the federal government alone couldn’t execute Trump’s plan to deport 12 million people by November 2026. But like any good salesman, Prince had just the solution: hire contractors “to supplement that capability with what the private sector does best: find a way to do something cheaper, better, and faster at greater scale.” 

For anyone with experience in the public sector, this is an enticing and familiar pitch. Governments around the world routinely outsource public work to private consultants, often for innocuous reasons. And of course not every function of the immigration system is inherently evil. Just as Eisenhower recognized that a “vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment,” because the country could “no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” so too must there be courts and judges to process asylum claims, embassies to issue visas, and transportation to reunite families. 

But the line between legitimate business and graft is a blurry one in a system that outsources integral parts of public administration to the private sector. When government officials are nothing more than clients looking for vendors, where does democracy end and kleptocracy begin?  

Take Homan, whose business interests apparently are not limited to Cava bags. In August, Migrant Insider reported that Trump’s border czar “has built a sprawling financial network of private consulting, nonprofit ventures, and speaking engagements,” and that “while directing federal policy, he has also maintained deep ties to private companies and political nonprofits that benefit from expanded detention and deportation.” These ties included at least $5,000 in consulting fees from GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies running ICE detention centers, and the target of lawsuits and other complaints from human rights and pro-immigrant groups who accuse the company of poor conditions and abuse of detainees and staff alike.

The idea that the US should run its government like a business is almost always a bad one, but it’s especially pernicious when applied to a system serving people as vulnerable as migrants. In April, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told a border security conference in Phoenix that his agency needs “to get better at treating this like a business.” He imagined the country’s vast immigration system, which affects the lives of millions, could function “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours.” Lyons failed to mention that Amazon ships products, not people, and that this “efficiency” comes at a high cost to its workers and the environment.

The short-term costs of the immigration-industrial complex are apparent in every headline describing the inhumane conditions at unsanitary and overcrowded detention facilities. But these stories often don’t show the fact that public-private partnerships have a tendency to take root and metastasize. This is true beyond immigration. As private companies win more public contracts, they can hollow out the government’s capacity and expertise, further justifying their business in a perpetual and malicious cycle.

Though Eisenhower’s warning went unheeded, it’s not too late to stop the military-industrial complex’s immigration mutation before it metastasizes further. Immigrant rights groups representing detainees, as well as other civil society organizations, have sued the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, often successfully. 

Democrats in Congress have exercised their oversight role by conducting unannounced visits on ICE detention facilities, to which they are legally entitled. “It’s far too easy for standards to slip,” US Representative Veronica Escobar said after touring a massive detention camp in her district. “Private facilities far too frequently operate with a profit margin in mind as opposed to a governmental facility.” US Senator Richard Blumenthal and US Representative Robert Garcia have also held public fora with testimony from victims of ICE abuse as part of an ongoing investigation into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Without a majority in either chamber, however, Democratic lawmakers are more limited in their ability to demand accountability or enact reform without cooperation from their Republican colleagues — a dynamic that seems unlikely to change before the midterm elections in November.

But solutions to the government’s problems often come from the ground up. In his farewell address, Eisenhower said we must never let the combination of national defense and private industry “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” He continued, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Over the past few months, the power of such an alert and knowledgeable citizenry has been on full display in the streets. From Illinois to Minnesota, protesters have directed their energy and applied pressure not just on the government, but on the private companies and their willing participation on which the immigration-industrial complex relies. 

As the deadly slayings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis tragically illustrate, these protest actions come with great risks. But they have not been completely in vain. In early January, Avelo Airlines announced it would end a contract it had signed less than a year prior to fly deportation charters for ICE after the Houston-based airline faced backlash and boycotts from customers, flight attendant unions, political leaders, and immigrant rights groups. “We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy,” Avelo’s CEO wrote in an email to employees.

The Coalition to Stop Avelo, meanwhile, had a different message. “We won!” a recent statement on the group’s website begins. “This decision shows that collective action can make a difference. At a time when immigrant communities are under relentless attack, this news offers proof that resistance works. From the tarmac to the ticket counter, our organizing created a sustained pressure campaign that Avelo could no longer ignore.”

Top photo: Protesters gathered to march at an “ICE Out of MN” demonstration in Minneapolis on Jan. 23, 2026 (Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons)