The more than $175 billion that Congress handed to the nation’s immigration enforcers when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—just one component of the Department of Homeland Security—is getting more money than any other law-enforcement agency in America. All of this cash will be used to fund the next three and a half years of a deportation campaign that the public is already starting to question, at a time when the southern border is all but deserted.
But as striking as the overall amount of money is how little we know about why it was necessary or how the funds will be spent. The bill placed few guardrails on ICE or Customs and Border Protection—both of which have a history of financial mismanagement—and dedicated no money to oversight. What we do know from the agencies’ public statements and contracts that are already in the works is that the money will be used to expand detention and surveillance systems, and that it will enrich some of the administration’s closest friends.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated, top executives at the two largest private-prison companies that contract with the federal government to detain immigrants reacted with glee. In an earnings call with investors, Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, called this “truly one of the most exciting periods” in his 32-year career with the company. CoreCivic’s stock price rose by more than 80 percent in the week after Trump’s reelection, while that of its top competitor, the GEO Group, doubled in less than a month. GEO’s CEO, J. David Donahue, told investors that “we believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced.” GEO’s executive chairman and founder, George Zoley, estimated that the company could make $1 billion in additional revenue. (Whereas some in the private-prison industry might have become jittery when Trump started talking about detaining immigrants in Guantánamo Bay or countries such as El Salvador, instead of the United States, Hininger assured his investors that there would be enough detained immigrants to go around. “I want to be very clear on this: We don’t see that as an either/or. We actually see it as a both,” he said.)
[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]
GEO invested $70 million preparing to expand its detention capacity before Trump even took office; CoreCivic spent $40 million doing the same before a single new contract was signed. Just three years earlier, President Joe Biden had signed an executive order directing the Justice Department not to renew its contracts with private-prison companies, saying that they amounted to “profit-based incentives to incarcerate” in a system that “imposes significant costs and hardships on our society and communities and does not make us safer.” JPMorgan Chase said it would stop working with the industry. But now, with Trump, the companies’ leaders had good reason to feel confident: His election meant the elevation of figures such as Pam Bondi, who worked as a lobbyist for GEO as recently as 2019 and became attorney general in February, and Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, who was a GEO consultant during the Biden administration. The website for Homan’s consulting firm touted 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.” Homan has said he is recusing himself from contract negotiations now that he is back working for the government.
For years, high-level officials at ICE have retired from the agency into plum roles at both companies. Daniel Bible, who oversaw ICE’s detention system, is an executive vice president at GEO, and Matt Albence and Dan Ragsdale, ICE’s former acting director and deputy director, are senior vice presidents. CoreCivic has taken on at least two former ICE field-office directors and ICE’s former head of budgeting. David Venturella has ping-ponged between the two: After 22 years at ICE, he rose through the executive ranks at GEO to become the company’s head of client relations. Then, after Trump took office, he returned to ICE as a senior adviser.
This revolving door of hiring effectively puts private-prison-company executives at the negotiating table across from their former underlings, who may also hope to cash out in the private sector when they leave their government jobs. These conditions are not exactly conducive to making sure that the government’s top negotiators don’t agree to overpay for what they are purchasing, or that they hold contractors to account. DHS officials didn’t respond to my request for a comment. Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, told me the company follows rules set by the government for how former employees may interact with their previous agencies, and that “there’s no basis for the claim that hiring former ICE officials results in higher costs or reduced accountability.”
The confidence expressed by GEO and CoreCivic executives has paid off. Trump’s spending bill provides $45 billion to ICE to expand the nation’s detention system. It also dedicates $3.33 billion to immigration courts, but caps the number of judges who can be hired at 800–one of the few limits the bill contains. At the same time, the administration has actually been firing immigration judges, who have the power to hand down deportation orders and without which a person can’t be removed from the United States. Hiring more will take months or years, and in the meantime, having fewer of them around now will only lead to more people being detained. “They’re not really serious about getting rid of as many people as they can. They’re serious about causing human pain and suffering,” a former high-level ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, told me. “Putting someone into detention isn’t a removal, it’s a punishment.”
Allies of the administration are also in for a windfall in the technology sector. Palantir—whose co-founder and board chairman, Peter Thiel, is a strong supporter of Vice President J. D. Vance and has a hot-and-cold-but-mostly-hot relationship with Trump—has already secured $30 million to help ICE identify immigrants and track their locations. Palantir’s stock price has soared by 200 percent since Trump was reelected, helped by the growth of its government contracts under both Democratic and Republican administrations and its work in AI.
Several former Palantir employees have gone to work for DOGE, which is reportedly creating a “master database” of immigrants by leveraging data from across the federal government. How the administration will use its stockpile of data, which almost certainly includes information on unsuspecting American citizens too, remains unclear. For a decade after 9/11, DHS spent millions surveilling people from predominantly Muslim countries as part of a program that the government later acknowledged “provided no discernible public benefit.”
ICE has also expanded into phone tracking, and posted a request for contracts to help it monitor up to 1 million people using their social-media accounts, financial records, and the dark web, among other information sources. In April, CBP posted a request for information from vendors on how to expand the use of facial-recognition technology at the border. Trump’s big spending bill provides the agencies nearly $6 billion to fund these technological advancements.
This kind of spyware might make sense if precision were a priority in the administration’s approach to deportations, but the opposite appears to be true. On the streets and in immigration courts, it’s become clear, as ICE strives to conduct 3,000 arrests a day, that anyone whose legal status is in doubt is fair game, including people with no criminal history—even children. Undocumented immigrants aren’t at all hard to find in the United States: They’re on farms and dairies and in restaurant kitchens and at construction sites. They’re delivering groceries and warm meals to front doors across the country, cleaning and landscaping homes, and caring for elders. An efficient way of deporting 1 million people a year would involve ICE simply raiding those workplaces one by one. But the administration has already learned that the political blowback from doing so would be untenable, because businesses would fail and communities would revolt. Instead of paring back its goals, the White House has continued spending indiscriminately. “They want a lot of toys because it’s fun, but a lot of those toys are not necessary or probably all that helpful at the end of the day in terms of actually making the arrests,” the former ICE official told me.
For years, Congress has criticized CBP and ICE for mismanaging their budgets, while also increasing those budgets at a remarkable pace. Since at least 2012, the United States has spent more money on immigration enforcement than on all other federal-law-enforcement endeavors combined. CBP’s budget went from $5.9 billion in 2003 to $13.6 in 2016; ICE’s increased by 50 percent over the same stretch of time, reaching $6.3 billion in 2016, according to The Deportation Machine, a book by the University of Illinois historian Adam Goodman. The next year, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, House appropriators called out ICE for a “lack of fiscal discipline and cavalier management of funding for detention operations.” In 2018, appropriators scolded the agency again for its “inability to manage detention resources.”
[Read: Trump’s deportations aren’t what they seem]
Congress has specifically faulted ICE for its inability to estimate how much money it will need to carry out its mission, and just this year, legislators raised alarms about the agency’s “especially egregious” overspending. But when it came time to draft Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, its authors seem to have accepted the agency’s requests without question. In a year that has already been one of the deadliest on record in immigration-detention facilities, the bill seems to leave health and safety standards up to the discretion of the secretary, potentially dispensing with years of bipartisan work to establish baseline requirements. Homan has indicated that he believes immigrant-detention standards are too high, and DOGE gutted the two offices that oversaw them: the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. But an ICE spokesperson told reporters that the agency continues to uphold the rules without any changes to its oversight procedures.
The growth that the immigration-detention system is about to undergo may be difficult, if not impossible, to undo. The facilities tend to become economic engines in the communities that surround them, many of which are rural and poor. Once they open, closing them can become a political problem in its own right. Nancy Hiemstra, a professor at Stony Brook University who co-wrote the book Immigration Detention Inc., told me that since the system was established, its funding has almost never decreased. Instead, the spending is reinforced by all of the people and organizations whose financial interest is geared toward growth, including the subcontractors that operate within detention centers, providing services such as medical care and food. The same will be true of state and local agencies vying for a portion of at least $10 billion in reimbursement funds that Trump’s bill created for those that help the administration with immigration enforcement. “Right now they’re saying, ‘We need more space, we’re overcrowded,’ creating this idea of chaos and overcrowding to use more funds,” she told me. “Then, once the money is out there, there are many people who are dependent on it.”