Companies reap $22bn from Trump’s immigration crackdown

0:01Since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration has made the deportation of undocumented immigrants one of its signature policy goals. At the center of much of this effort are a couple of government agencies, including ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But these goals aren't being executed by the government alone. This is happening with the help of private sector companies. So just to name a few, there's companies you've probably heard of, like Microsoft or Amazon, Palantir or Deloitte. But there's also a lot of smaller businesses contracting in there.

0:39There's an airline broker called CSI Aviation. There's a construction firm called Fisher Sand and Gravel. That's my colleague Peter Andringa. He's part of the FT's visual investigations team. And he and some of our colleagues spent months reporting on the sprawling web of private sector businesses that are beneficiaries of this expanded effort. Over the last 12 months, we've seen record numbers of arrests, detentions and deportations from the country. The White House calls this the largest mass deportation campaign in history. Last year, ICE got more money to carry out these efforts. The agency received an additional$75 billion from Congress to be used over the next four years on top of its existing annual funding.

1:23That money makes it the largest law enforcement agency in the country. There's huge amounts of new contracting, new hiring, new spending, and ultimately new deportation operations. And knowing that suddenly ICE has this huge ambition, huge new budgets, I knew that contractors would be lining up and looking for a piece of this.

1:48I'm Michaela Tendera from the Financial Times. Today on Behind the Money, we're taking a look at which companies are getting the most out of the U.S. government's expanded deportation operations.

2:20Hi, Peter. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Michaela. So the focus of your reporting has been on contracts that companies have with two U.S. government agencies, ICE and CBP. Tell me a little bit just about these groups. So ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And historically, it's in charge of enforcing the country's immigration policies inside the domestic interior of the country. CBP stands for Customs and Border Protection, its sister agency, which historically has been in charge of enforcement along the borders and ports. Both ICE and CBP exist inside the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, which was set up just after the 9-11 attacks.

3:06And while both of these agencies have always been pretty active in domestic immigration enforcement, their power has really ebbed and flowed between administrations. And so the real change that we've seen in 2025 and now the beginning of 2026 is a dramatic increase in the scope and scale of their ambitions. So, Peter, to find out more about which companies are making money from these departments, you really had to do a lot of digging around in various documents and data. So how did you get started with all that? So as a reporter on the Visual Investigations team, we draw on three main categories of information to learn about these agencies.

3:46The first is that the government itself publishes all sorts of data that lets us understand just a little bit of how money flows in and out of agencies and to private sector companies. The second category is people who are involved, whether it's current or former officials in the agencies, employees for the companies, people who have been in detention or been on deportation flights can tell us about how the system operates. We benefit from the expertise of a huge number of academics and activists and researchers who study different components of the immigration system. And there's a group called Human Rights First, and they do a lot of flight monitoring And in some cases, they actually have volunteers who go and stand outside of airport fences and watch flights load and try to count the number of people getting on them.

4:33And then the third category is open source information. So we use satellite images to measure the square footage of detention centers and track how given facilities might grow over time. Or we can use flight tracking data to count the number of planes that are moving and understand whether or not they're likely to be ICE deportation flights based on the publicly available flight tracking information. Hmm. So with interviewing these sources and analyzing the open source and government data, what have you found? So since Trump took office, we've calculated that over a thousand companies made more than$22 billion in contracts with ICE and CBP over the last year.

5:12I haven't been so surprised by many of the companies that you see involved. It's often the type of firms that you'd expect to be working for the government or for law enforcement. And many of them have longstanding relationships with ICE or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. The real surprising thing to me is just the scale and the scope of the change in ICE's operations. They've grown so much since this bill passed in July that gave them billions of new funding. So tell me more about the sorts of companies that you came across. So ICE relies on a huge sort of web of private corporations.

5:49Some of these are pretty specialized corporations that focus on national security. There are private prison companies like GeoGroup or CoreCivic that help ICE run detention centers across the country. There's charter airlines like CSI Aviation, which is a broker, or GlobalX, which is a plane operator, that help ICE conduct its deportation flights. There's tech companies like Palantir and Capgemini that help ICE manage and process and ingest mountains of data from the internet, from government databases, to understand and prioritize people for deportation across the country. And there's all sorts of other companies that are helping power the infrastructure.

6:25ICE and its parent agency, DHS, have tons and tons of software applications that run in the clouds of tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Other companies provide computers and office supplies and forensic equipment. And there's also consulting firms like Deloitte, who provide staffing support for financial operations and other services to help supplement ICE's own employees. Some of these companies hold contracts directly with the government. Others work with resellers and middlemen who manage the procurement process. As Peter and our colleagues at the FT have spent the past several months reporting on the company's contracting with ICE and CBP, I asked him to tell me more about what he's learned from this process.

7:09This is what he said. There's three main themes I've noticed over the last year or so. One is that there's some surprisingly small companies involved who have really strong connections and ties to Trump, his campaigns, and people in his orbit. The second is that many of these contractors are operating in a way that has led human rights activists and immigration lawyers to raise real concerns about the safety and human rights of people in ICE custody. And the third is that there's an increasing amount of backlash from customers and from employees that these companies are facing, given the intense political unpopularity of some of ICE's actions over the last year.

7:52So I want to talk more about each of those different themes you've seen. You said that some of these companies that you've looked into have connections to President Donald Trump. How so? If you take the two companies that ICE and CBP have each spent the most amount of money with, I think you see some interesting examples of what we're talking about here. The top recipient of ICE contracts last year was an airline broker called CSI Aviation. And they act as a middleman between ICE and charter airlines. Last year, they received more than a billion dollars for the service. They're a family-run business in New Mexico, and their founder and CEO, Alan Wei, is an interesting guy.

8:36He's been a huge supporter of Trump over the years, donating to all three of his presidential campaigns. His daughter, Deborah, also used to work for CSI. She was involved in the fake electors' effort to overturn Trump's defeat in 2020. And in 2024, the Trump campaign paid to host a rally in one of CSI's own hangars near Albuquerque. But I've come here today with a message of hope for all Americans. With your vote in this election, I will end inflation. I will stop the massive invasion of criminals into your state. And I will bring back the American dream. We're going to bring back the American dream.

9:14Meanwhile, CBP's top contractor last year was another family business called Fisher Sand and Gravel. They're a construction company that started in North Dakota. but the main thing they're most known for is that, in 2019 and 2020, they helped build this privately funded section of the border wall. That wall was part of a crowdfunding campaign run by Steve Bannon and a handful of other prominent Trump supporters. In the end, some of them, including Bannon, pled guilty to defrauding donors and misusing some of those funds. There's no indication that Fisher was involved in the fraud, but the crowdfunding campaign certainly raised their profile as a border wall builder.

9:50Their CEO, Tommy Fisher, has appeared on Fox News a bunch to talk about it. We're here to do exactly what we came to, is deliver border security for every single American, and we can prove it works. Fisher got a few contracts near the end of the first Trump administration, but this time he's gotten many, many more. Six and a half billion dollars worth since Trump took office last year. In the end, you have to build a barrier, and our barrier lasts 150 years. What do the companies and the government say about these connections? So we've called and emailed CSI and Fisher and haven't heard anything back from them.

10:28But for its part, the White House says that they're following procurement rules. And they basically say that, you know, they're trying to get money out the door as fast as they possibly can. And so they're turning to firms that they think they can know and trust because this goal is just so ambitious and so important to them. Now, I want to discuss that second theme you've mentioned regarding human rights and safety concerns. Tell me more about these alleged issues that you've reported on. So there's a whole range of concerns that a lot of people have about how ICE is operating. One is in the detention centers, which are run by for-profit prison companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic.

11:08And we spoke with immigrants and their lawyers and researchers and academics who study the system and told us that there are widespread reports of people sleeping on floors and not having adequate hygiene and cleaning facilities, not having access to good medical care, not having space to talk to their lawyers or an ability to get in touch with their families. And traditionally, these detention facilities were overseen by an office in DHS called the Office for the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, where a detainee or their lawyers could go to DHS and say, I think that these conditions in these detention centers are inhumane or have violated my rights in some way.

11:51Now, in the last year, the Trump administration has fired nearly everyone from the Office of the Ombudsman. and a related office called the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. For its part, DHS told me these offices were, quote, internal adversaries who, quote, obstructed immigration enforcement. A spokesperson said that the department is committed to civil rights and is streamlining its oversight. I see. So it sounds like this area of the department has really changed recently. What's that mean going forward? Yeah, I've spoken to a lot of lawyers, activists, and former officials from these offices who hold real concerns about whether the department can police itself going forward in the same way.

12:38Where else has your reporting revealed these kinds of human rights or safety concerns? We see the same thing with these charter deportation flights. I talked to passengers and staff on some of these flights who described the flights as chaotic and disorganized and particularly pointed to the fact that passengers on these flights are handcuffed and in leg irons for the entire duration of the flight. We documented flights that were 20, 24, 30 hours long, multiple stops around the world. And so having these passengers who are shackled on these long flights with sort of limited food and bathroom breaks and a real risk if something were to go wrong in an emergency, that they wouldn't be able to evacuate the flight appropriately, has led to a lot of people involved in these flights and also activists outside of the agency raising real concerns about the safety and health of the passengers on them.

13:30What of the companies running these flights and the detention centers said about these health and safety concerns? GeoGroup and CoreCivic, two of the detention facility operators, have told us that they deny any accusations of inhuman conditions or overcrowding in their facilities and say that they're meeting the requirements set by their arrangements with ICE. And to be clear, you know, these companies' operations are dictated by ICE, right? ICE is setting the goals for how many people these companies need to detain or to transport. And again, DHS also denies these claims. They say that detainees have access to medical care and legal support.

14:10Now, the other thread that you mentioned is public backlash that some of these contractors have received. Tell me more about which companies have experienced that. So there's quite a few companies that have seen more public backlash. And one company which has been caught up in the controversy in the last couple of weeks is the tech company Capgemini, which provides consulting services for ICE. And in particular, has taken on a couple of contracts to help ICE identify and locate potential deportation targets using both digital and physical surveillance. Because some of the work that Capgemini does for ICE is seen as national security work, all of its government contracts in the U.S.

14:51are run by a U.S. subsidiary with a separate and independent board of directors. And so this has become a controversy because the French parent company didn't know that they were bidding on these ICE contracts or doing this work helping ICE build out a surveillance network. And there's been a lot of protests and public backlash in France, including from politicians. And so as a result of all this pressure, the French parent company agreed at the beginning of this month to sell the U.S. subsidiary. A Capgemini spokesperson told me that the divestment is underway and that they're also reviewing all of their other subsidiaries to ensure they have more oversight and are aligned with those groups' activities.

15:31Any other examples that you've found? Yeah, another example of a company who's seen a lot of backlash over the last year is a consumer budget airline called Avello Airlines. And it's sort of a small competitor to regional U.S. airlines that have been trying to grow a lot in the last couple of years. They started working for ICE through CSI Aviation, that broker I mentioned earlier, to help ICE move detainees between facilities across the country. And as a result of this, they've received a lot of negative media attention. There have been protests. There have been boycotts.

16:04Peter Andringa: What do we want? A Velo now. When do we want it? Now. A string of protests nationwide urging boycotts over the Houston-based airlines. A group of protesters calling for a boycott of Avalo Airlines. There is pushback tonight in New Haven after Avello Airlines agreed to charter deportation flights. For most of 2025, Avello stood pretty firmly behind these contracts. At one point, the founder wrote a letter to employees saying that the income from these flights was necessary to stabilize their finances and continue their operations. But in January, Avello announced they were ending their relationship with ICE and stopping the deportation flights they were operating.

16:41The company told me the decision was a financial one, saying that ICE revenue was not consistent enough to overcome the operational complexity it involved. They also said they didn't see any effect from the boycotts, with an 11 % increase in their customers in 2025.

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17:44So, Peter, you were talking a bit before about the airline Avello's financial picture. I'd like to understand more, you know, once these companies start working with ICE or CBP, what have you found in terms of the kind of impact that that has on their financials? Has it helped them, hurt them? So a lot of the firms that do business with ICE saw their stock price shoot up when Trump was elected in November 2024. But since then, some of them have seen their stock prices stagnate or even fall back down. And so an interesting example of this is the private prison operator Geo Group. Their profits have gone up in the last year, and the revenue has increased as well.

18:27But their stock price hasn't really recovered to that November 2024 peak. And I think this reflects that working for ICE is a complicated and sometimes low-margin business. GlobalX, which is the biggest airline operator for ICE, has reported big increases in its revenue, but still basically broke even in 2025. They didn't see a big increase in their profits. And I think that shows that in some cases, these companies are seeing a lot more demand, but are struggling to scale up fast enough and are struggling to turn that demand into profits. And so I think that the companies and ultimately their investors are realizing that a big increase in ICE spending is not necessarily an immediate big increase for corporate profits.

19:14The big exception to this is Palantir, the data processing tech company. Tell me more about that. Why is Palantir an exception? So Palantir stock has had a big post-election bump in 2024. And since then, they've also had big increases in government revenue. But they've also had big increases in their profits. Their stock prices continued growing over the last year, basically doubling since Inauguration Day. And that's even after the tech sector pullback of the last couple of weeks. They're one of ICE's most prominent, you might even say infamous, contractors, doing a lot of data work to help the agency manage information about immigrants and facilitate operations across the country.

19:54A spokesperson told me they were proud to support DHS. And their CEO, Alex Karp, has been really vocal about his support for the immigration project. You know what? I'm going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration. Palantir received$81 million in contracts over the first year. But it's actually a pretty small slice of their overall revenue, which is about$4 billion in 2025. A big chunk of that is Department of Defense contracts. But I think one of the big drivers of Palantir's stock price growth is actually their commercial consulting business. Their revenue from U.S.

20:28companies doubled last year, and they expect it to double again this year, they've said. In some ways, I think this suggests that the work for ICE is a big, high-profile project Palantir supports and believes a lot in. But it's really not their core financial engine. Some people might even say their reputation as ICE's data wizards makes for good marketing. We've talked about responses from investors and customers. What about employees of some of these companies? Have we seen much of a response from them? Yeah, so in the wake of all the attention on ICE, and especially after the shootings in Minnesota, we have seen more activism from employees at some companies, especially those in big tech.

21:08There was an open letter written by some Google employees asking the company to stop providing cloud services to DHS. Other staff at Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech firms signed an open letter calling for their employees to halt work with ICE. In many cases, these companies aren't direct contractors for ICE, and instead they sell through middlemen. But in the intense political environment and attention on ICE, these employees still want their employers to distance themselves from the immigration operations. However, I think so far we're seeing sort of limited impacts from this activism. This Trump administration feels very different from the first, where you saw a lot of activism from tech sector employees pushing their companies to cut contracts with the Pentagon or other controversial agencies.

21:50This time, it feels like the pushback is a little bit more muted. How is the administration responding to this public pushback? So the White House told me that they believe President Trump has a mandate from voters to carry out this deportation campaign. And so I think that they see it that they can use every tool at their disposal. DHS told me that its agencies strictly follow all of the federal acquisition rules in this process. So there is another wrinkle to the story that we haven't talked about yet. DHS and ICE and CBP under it are technically shut down at the moment. The agency hasn't received an agreement on what their 2026 budget will look like.

22:30Fill me in on that and what might happen next on the political end. Democrats in Congress are starting to push back much harder against DHS. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, among others, spoke about this in Congress at the end of January. Enough is enough. What ICE is doing outside the law is state-sanctioned thuggery, and it must stop. And Congress has the authority and the moral obligation to act. So after the shootings in Minnesota in January, Congress actually sort of agreed to separate out DHS funding from negotiations around funding the rest of the government. And what that meant is that at the end of January, they passed a bill to fund most of the government, but didn't fund DHS.

23:18Democrats in the Senate say they want to ensure that ICE is operating lawfully before they renew its annual funding. First, end the roving patrols. Second, enforce accountability. Third, masks off, body cameras on. Each officer must have visible, visible ID. And they're seeking to get a number of different concessions about how ICE operations work in order to agree to continue funding the agency. On the other hand, ICE still has so much money from the summer. It appears that immigration enforcement efforts are continuing during the shutdown. And I think you're more likely to see effects of this in other parts of DHS, like FEMA, which manages emergency response, or TSA that handles airport security.

24:09The White House told me this shutdown risks critical services for Americans. Now, wrapping up, we've talked about some examples where maybe these contracts aren't necessarily profit machines for the businesses or they face public backlash. Do you foresee a time where companies decide to pull back and abandon these contracts? I think right now, many of these companies don't see a real incentive to back off from their work with ICE. I think, except for a few examples, with international companies like Capgemini being the most prominent, most companies have seemed to be resilient to activism and boycotts and people calling for them to stop their work with ICE.

24:55I think where you could see that change is in the fall, if Democrats take the House or the Senate and create even more pressure. I think at that point you might see the political winds changing, leading to a change in corporate strategy around working for ICE. But so far, I think most ICE contractors seem to be happy to take the business with the government. they see it as an opportunity to cash in on what is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing and most high profile agencies of the Trump era. Well, plenty to keep an eye on. Peter, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

25:42Behind the Money is hosted by me, Michaela Tendera. This episode was produced by me and Safiya Ethman. Fact-checking by Simon Greaves. Sound design and mixing by Kelly Gary and Sam Giovinco Special thanks to Christian Berthelsen, Stephen Foley, Sam Joyner, Brooke Masters, and Rafe Rosner-Oden Original music is by Hannes Brown Topher Forges is our executive producer Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio Thanks for listening. See you next week

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