Multiple ICE warehouses were sold by people in Trump’s circle who were sitting on the properties and losing money. We dug into it, and found that some properties were bought by the feds for ten times their list price. It’s a new level of corruption—and you’re paying for it.
- Report by More Perfect Union on X, May 20, 2026
Two federal government agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), have become infamous for their violent tactics under Trump 2.0, which have resulted in the extrajudicial killings of both immigrants and protesters and systematic violations of due process for detainees.
Less attention has been devoted as to how the administration has channeled funding for ICE to its cronies. As a reader of this blog, it should not surprise you that the kleptocratic class has found a way to make big bucks off the immigrant detention system. This week, we’re digging into who benefits from the deportation state, as an update to our analysis from last year.
Who Profits When ICE Buys a Warehouse?
To meet the mass deportation goals of Donald Trump’s second term, the administration planned to build an infrastructure of detention facilities with up to 107,000 beds for detainees awaiting deportation by the end of 2025. The initial strategy was to simply put up tent cities at military bases. This has not gone well. For example, a report by the Government Accountability Office in June found that in the case of Camp East Montana, located at Fort Bliss in Texas, the shoddy procurement practices and insufficient oversight from the $1.3 billion contract resulted in “millions of dollars in waste” and safety and security risks for detainees and staff.
The second phase to expand ICE detention facilities was through the purchase and refurbishing of warehouses. ICE spent $700 million to buy seven warehouses, and then decided to sell them off after they were challenged in court. A reporter at More Perfect Union, Mae Ryan, noticed, “Many of these warehouses had been sitting on the market for years. Now DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] was buying them at a massive markup.”
Guess who was on the receiving end of the price hikes? Ryan determined that some of the warehouses had been owned by financial institutions with connections to the Trump administration.
Here are two examples from her reporting:
Detention Facility Sales in Pennsylvania and Utah
As for the owners who profited from the sales? About 35 members of the Trump administration have investments in Blue Owl, including the president himself, while Deutsche Bank has loaned Trump about $2.5 billion over the past two decades.
Investigative journalist Michael Wriston asserts the windfall for Trump and his supporters was part of the plan: “ICE doesn’t necessarily want to be using warehouses...The plan came from folks very close to the White House who were sitting on properties that were causing them losses every year. And the decision was made to buy them at taxpayer expense.”
$307,000 per Bed: The Real Price of ICE's Newest Strategy
The strategy to reach the Trump administration’s deportation targets is now in its third, wasteful iteration. Now, the federal government aims to buy up private detention centers. This is a quick way to spend down ICE’s massively expanded budget while gaining a detention foothold in blue states that restrict private prisons.
TIME reported, for example, that DHS bought two facilities in California from Core Civic at roughly 4 to 4.5 times their assessed value. CoreCivic reportedly continues to profit from both sales, since it retains the contracts to operate the facilities on a day-to-day basis.
Detention Facility Sales in California
For context, CoreCivic and its competitor, the GEO Group, are the biggest owners of private ICE detention facilities in the country, as well as other private prison facilities.
It’s no surprise that GEO Group and CoreCivic are reaping record profits under Trump 2.0: they announced a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue this spring, not counting the $1.6 billion for four facilities sold to DHS by CoreCivic. For example, CoreCivic’s CEO made sure he told investors on his earning call that it all works out to $307,000 per bed. That’s an incredible amount paid for the abysmal standards immigrants encounter in these facilities, which we’ll address in a later section.
Donations In, Contracts Out: The Deportation Industry's Political Machine
The shady dealings don’t end with Trump’s corporate cronies raking in cash off the suffering of immigrants. We’ll start with the political contributions that offered incredible returns on the initial investment:
In July, a GEO Group subsidiary donated $1.4 million to MAGA, Inc., President Trump’s political action committee after receiving contracts worth $165 million a year to detain immigrants.
The GEO Group contributed $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration, and its executives contributed nearly $1.5 million to the Trump campaign. The company also donated $250,000 in an undisclosed “dark money” contribution last year to a group aligned with Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the congressional committee overseeing ICE.
In 2024, CoreCivic and its CEO donated $816,600 to Trump’s campaign and inaugural committee.
Meanwhile the government-to-industry loop, the swamp that was supposed to be drained is as present as ever. According to Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW), Border Czar Tom Homan was reportedly a paid consultant for GEO Group in the two years before joining DHS, and he also personally helped install former GEO Group executive David Venturella as Acting Director of ICE. To date, Homan has ignored formal demands from House Democrats to recuse himself from matters benefiting his former client. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi also has ties to GEO Group, which she lobbied for prior to her tenure as the head of the Department of Justice.
Donald Trump began buying stocks in GEO Group and CoreCivic on the tenth day of his second term, and has made 29 trades of these companies up to an estimated value of almost $1 million to date. Unlike all other US presidents before him, Trump has not taken any measures to avoid conflicts of interest while in public office, like putting his assets in a blind trust.
All told, the business of moving hundreds of thousands (and eventually millions) of humans has become incredibly lucrative. As Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, noted:
If Trump were to decide that’s enough for deportation, these companies would be in economic and fiscal trouble. That’s the problem a lot of people have with the private facilities: they have this fiscal interest in keeping people behind bars. But we’re not just doing it to keep the country safer. We’re doing it to keep these companies in business.
The chart below, based on data from Open Secrets, illustrates this clearly.
Top ICE Contractors in 2025
(Note: CSI Aviation is owned by Deborah Maestas, one of Trump’s fake electors that tried to reverse the 2020 election results.)
The People Behind the Profits
All these ill-gotten gains by Trump, his inner circle, and his cronies should not obscure the humanitarian tragedy unfolding before us. The Trump administration has fought ferociously to avoid scrutiny of the inhumane conditions inside these facilities, limiting oversight by impeding access for members of Congress and reducing the number of internal ICE inspections.
Conditions are notoriously brutal. The GEO Group manages Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where detainees went on a hunger strike in May to protest squalid conditions. Detainees in the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida complained of being treated like animals before it was forced to close. Texas state legislators also released a report alleging torture, sexual assault, and other inhumane treatment at Fort Bliss. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has said he was “astounded by the now-routine abuse and denigration of migrants and refugees.” The Guardian reported that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, almost three times the number of detainee deaths in 2024.
To be clear, these conditions are unjust no matter who suffers them. But it is especially galling to consider the scale and scope of the administration’s cruelty, which has targeted hundreds of thousands of our neighborhoods, friends, and community members for no reason at all.
Despite the rhetoric from the Trump administration that ICE is removing the “worst of the worst,” an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News found that about 14% of the nearly 400,000 people ICE arrested in 2025 had been charged or convicted for violent criminal offenses. According to the same document, about 46% of those arrested by ICE have charges or convictions for non-violent criminal offenses, while the remaining 40% have no criminal record at all. The data suggests that immigrants are largely being scapegoated to fuel a costly enforcement apparatus that benefits political messaging and private contractors far more than it protects the public.
An Unprecedented Amount of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Since Donald Trump has dismantled the Inspector General system within our government, we may never know the true scale of the waste, fraud, and abuse within our immigration detention system. But the outrageous doubling, tripling, and quadrupling value of multi-million-dollar properties for an insider group of companies makes one thing abundantly clear. The anti-immigration system isn't just cruel: it's a case study in kleptocracy.
What You Can Do
Stay informed. Follow Project Salt Box to keep abreast of the money and contracts behind immigration detention. Project Salt Box also suggests leveraging its data to:
Make community impact statements and flyers that you can use to persuade your local politicians and business owners.
Pressure the “middlemen” such as the warehouse owners, businesses, and contractors to disassociate from ICE’s shady dealings.
Support local media by sending them the data for their analysis and reporting.
Pressure Congress to decrease ICE funding and increase oversight as it undergoes the 2027 Appropriations process.
Push your local and state government to cut ties with ICE’s immigration prison complex.
Support campaigns that divest from companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic.
Stand with Louisiana communities. The Trump administration is intending to open a new facility on a toxic waste site in Louisiana, where it will detain children and families. Right now, communities in Louisiana are fighting back to stop the La Salle Alexandria Airport Family and Child Detention facility from opening, and they need your help. You can use this easy tool to send a letter to your representatives demanding that they stop this center.
Weekly Wins
Before we dig into this week’s wins, we wanted to spotlight something important.
Last week, The New York Times highlighted the many ways that communities, organizations, universities, businesses, and foreign governments are pushing back against his threats and power grabs. Along the same lines, the Wall Street Journal noted that the same corporations that have donated to and benefitted from Trump’s policies over the last 18 months are getting nervous.
If the Democrats win the midterms, some companies could face congressional investigations. The most likely targets include companies that have made large donations to Trump or Trump’s projects, as well as those tied to Trump’s family members or children of the president’s senior aides, such as Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick. None of this means Trump should be underestimated. In the coming months and years, Trump is likely to turn up the heat and rush to get deals done before his regulatory capacity wanes. But it’s an encouraging start.
Now onto the wins.
Court Rules against Hegseth's Retaliation
A federal judge ruled that the Pentagon illegally blacklisted Anthropic, and that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth retaliated against the AI company after it refused to let Claude be used for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance. The judge called the Pentagon's "supply chain risk" designation "illegal and baseless," writing that "the empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics."
Administration Blocked from Cutting Funds over Immigration Policies
A judge has once again ruled that the Trump administration cannot cut off federal funding to cities and counties over their immigration policies. US District Judge William Orrick has repeatedly blocked the administration's attempts to withhold money from jurisdictions like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, ruling the government can't use executive orders to threaten local governments into compliance. As San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said, "Cities should not be forced to choose between their values and critical funding. We are grateful that courts have continued to rule in our favor." Overall, the ruling allows cities and counties across the country to retain about $14 billion in federal funds.
The Stanford Daily Secures a Big Win for Freedom of Speech
A judge sided with a university newspaper, The Stanford Daily, finding that the federal government violated the US Constitution when it targeted student journalists who wrote stories that criticized Israel and participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. In a 90-page ruling, the judge said the State Department and DHS had violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment in detaining and trying to deport non-citizen students who spoke out against Israel. The case was spearheaded by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Left and Right Come Together to Support the Rights of Protestors
In a striking show of cross-ideological coordination, three major conservative and libertarian groups—the Cato Institute, FIRE, and the Society for the Rule of Law—filed a joint brief backing left-wing Minneapolis protesters accused of blocking ICE operations. These groups argued that the government illegally targeted the protesters for their politics, and pointed to the administration's own files showing the investigation traces back to a Trump memo that broadly labels groups opposed to immigration enforcement as domestic terrorists.
A New Coalition Mobilizes to Protect Historic Sites
More than 600 historic preservation groups, architectural associations, tribal governments, and other organizations are working together to urge Congress to block Trump's plan to weaken federal laws protecting historic sites. The coalition says it's organizing to defend sites in every congressional district and is prepared to pursue legal action if lawmakers don't step in. The coalition was assembled by Cultural Heritage Partners and includes the American Institute of Architects, the National Parks Conservation Association, the Osage Nation, and hundreds of others.
Nurses Say "No" to Palantir's Surveillance
As part of the nationwide “Purge Palantir” campaign, hundreds of nurses, patients, and community allies mobilized across eight cities on August 27, demanding that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with Palantir. National Nurses United (NNU) says the company’s technology allows ICE to identify and arrest immigrants using improperly obtained Medicaid data, while also embedding itself in hospital staffing decisions with opaque, unaccountable data practices. “No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and CBP, enabled by Palantir’s technology,” said NNU President Jamie Brown.
More Links, More Kleptocracy
Build a Protection Racket
Bribes and influence peddling
Trump Jr. told GOP state attorneys general don’t fight prediction markets - CNBC
Trump family’s new crypto bank is funded by Abu Dhabi sheikh - WSJ
Clash between prediction markets and states set off a furious battle - NYT
Cronyism and favoritism
Trump’s quietly working to give a strip of Yosemite to a private developer - NOTUS
Trump official faces inquiry over claims he diverted wildfire resources to his own property - The Guardian
Decentralized violence and surveillance
How ICE arrests are soaring, including for immigrants with no criminal record - WaPo
Eswatini receives two more deportees under a controversial third-country deal - AP
How DHS created a workaround to turn Guard members into immigration officers - Politico
DHS conducted far-reaching surveillance of groups during ICE surge - NPR
Deportees Recount Harrowing Journeys to Africa: Shackles, a ‘Freezer’ and Blows - NYT
Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power
Executive power grabs
Centralizing executive authority
US aims to revive Civil War era court to claim Iran oil as prize - Bloomberg
Before Hegseth fired him, general was told to drop Kid Rock investigation - WaPo
Hegseth Blocks Promotions of Four Army Officers as Purge Widen - NYT
Deloitte to Pay $21.5 Million to End DOJ Fraud Investigation Over DEI Policies - WSJ
Targeting civil society and subnational government
Trump’s lawyers warn that Kennedy Center may need demolition if not fixed - NYT
Kennedy Center’s finances deteriorated sharply after Trump’s name went on it - WaPo
Scientific integrity and academic freedom
West Point professor fired after pushing back on limitations to teaching climate change, lawsuit says - Stars and Stripes
Foreign food safety inspections hit a historic low - ProPublica
Drive Division
Driving social division
White South Africans could get $4500 in aid if they come here as refugees - WaPo
Removal of a ‘woke’ painting signals a new line of attack on artists - WaPo
Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech
Censorship and retaliatory litigation
Trump goes after anonymous email provider in Italy. The real target is free speech in the US - The Intercept
Coordinate with Kleptocrats Abroad
Undermining US support for democracy activists abroad
Aligning with kleptocrats on the world stage
Manipulate Elections
Wyoming Governor Objects to ‘Very Odd’ D.O.J. Election Monitoring - NYT
Wyoming Governor requests investigation into DoJ monitors during primary - AP
Election deniers could soon control elections in three swing states - NOTUS
DHS bids to vacuum up voter registration, history from all 50 states - Courthouse News
Postal Service Rule Could Bar Millions From Voting by Mail - NYT
Terrific, important reporting. The whole MAGA enterprise is based on their assumption that few people are paying attention and that even fewer care about corruption. The President has said as much out loud. Keep proving them wrong.
Excellent article! How do they find time too fit all the corruption in? 🤔