THE SET-UP: “He’s not messing around.”
Of course, “he” is President Donald Trump … and the author of that juvenile turn of phrase (or should I say “turn of praise”?) was White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. She was announcing the first transfer of approximately one dozen migrants from Fort Bliss in Texas to Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. They flew on a C-17 military jet, which costs $28,500 an hour to fly. The Wall Street Journal pointedly compared that to the $8,500 an hour price-tag for “a standard U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight.” Unfortunately, we don’t have price tag for Trump’s plan to expand Gitmo.
The most recent calculation put the annual cost to hold 9/11 suspects at $13 million per prisoner. Legal limbo isn’t cheap. Now Trump’s team intends on housing up to 30k of the “worst of the worst” migrant criminal deportees. We don’t know the cost per prisoner, but we do know they need the beds. As it stands now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is releasing “dozens” detainees every day. Citing the most recent ICE statistics, CBS reported ICE detention facilities are currently…
…at 109% capacity, with the agency holding close to 42,000 migrant detainees, despite having, on paper, a 38,521-bed capacity in its network of for-profit prisons and county jails.
That means Trump’s crackdown is violating Trump’s executive order ending so-called “catch and release,” which was a regular target of his campaign’s rhetoric. It also implies they are rounding up non-criminal migrants they are comfortable releasing … unlike the hordes of dangerous, mentally ill Congolese gang rapists Trump promised to expel by the dozens. But Gitmo isn’t the only option if and when they are taken into custody.
President Bukele opened the door to El Salvador’s notorious prison system during a visit by new Sec’y Of State Marco Rubio. Bukele is willing to accept ICE’s deported migrants and, in a nod to one of Trump’s day/fever dreams, to house the US citizen-felons Trump would love to outsource. Given the obvious unconstitutionality of it, Trump’s more likely option is Gitmo. I fully expect to see an expanded Gitmo becoming a latter-day Devil’s Island. - jp
TITLE: The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump (And the Booming Border-Industrial Complex)
https://tomdispatch.com/the-mass-deportation-handoff-biden-to-trump/
EXCERPTS: [D]uring President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.
And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.
In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.
In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.
The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.
In Nogales, the [border] wall was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).
There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.
The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.
Back in Nogales…I was surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.
The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.
TITLE: ICE is swiftly expanding its sprawling surveillance apparatus
https://prismreports.org/2025/01/30/ice-surveillance-immigrants/
EXCERPTS: The U.S. federal agency in charge of detaining and deporting immigrants is poised to expand to unprecedented levels the sprawling surveillance apparatus left by the Biden administration.
Within days of President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted several notices on the federal procurement website seeking contractors to provide technological tools to enlarge, transform, and modernize the agency’s capabilities to track, monitor, and surveil noncitizens.
On Nov. 15, 2024, ICE posted a request for information from contractors on the federal procurement website to “augment its efforts towards ERO modernization and organizational transformation.” ERO stands for Enforcement Removal Operations, the division within ICE responsible for detaining and deporting noncitizens. ICE asked for “support for law enforcement systems programs, analysis, and operations.” The agency outlined one particularly alarming ability it needs: “predictive analytics and modeling” to collect data and improve forecasting methodologies and scenario-planning capabilities.
The request for information appears to have been looking for data brokers, many of which use artificial intelligence (AI) to “predict” crimes. According to the 2024 report “Automating Deportation” by Just Futures Law and Mijente, Al tools are tainted with discriminatory police practices because they are often based on historical crime data provided by law enforcement.
Take the data broker LexisNexis, a subsidiary of the British corporation RELX, which is key to ICE’s deportation machine. Its Accurint tool provides more than 11,000 ICE agents access to analytics that “automate” decisions about vetting, screening, and targeting people for deportation—the vast majority of whom are people of color. ICE’s records suggest that LexisNexis conducts large-scale surveillance for civil immigration arrests.
Advocates are especially concerned about the increasing use of data brokers, as they help federal agencies bypass privacy safeguards and violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable government searches and seizures. The Fourth Amendment has historically extended to noncitizens. Still, ICE agents have violated this right. It is also likely that the Trump administration will challenge this protection, as Trump has implied that constitutional rights do not apply to immigrants.
The role of data brokers in immigration enforcement is growing, said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). “This poses a lot of new challenges, particularly because information through data brokers such as LexisNexis is often used in a way that circumvents state and local restrictions on sharing information between the police and ICE.”
With an ICE contract worth $22 million expiring in 2028, LexisNexis Risk Solutions proffers alleged predictions before “crime and fraud can materialize.” Its tools not only track immigrants, but also ensnare U.S. residents. LexisNexis boasts generating reports on 282 million unique identities tied to individuals, and its dossiers reveal Social Security numbers and other personal information, including addresses, phone numbers, current and previous workplaces, social media accounts, data from phone apps, and similar identifying information for relatives and associates.
In 2021, the #NoTechforICE campaign was able to pressure the data broker Thomson Reuters to terminate its collaboration with ICE to track and deport undocumented people, as it had done since 2015. One of Thomson Reuters’ divisions is the Reuters news agency, one of the largest newswire services in the world that routinely covers immigration, which advocates have asserted for years is a conflict of interest.
The number of immigrants electronically monitored with an ankle shackle, wrist band, or the smartphone app SmartLINK skyrocketed during the Biden administration, from 86,860 in 2021 to 187,193 in December 2024, according to data compiled by the Syracuse University research center TRAC. These devices—amounting to what advocates call “e-carceration”—function on GPS geolocation and voice or facial recognition.
ICE agents and contractors can constantly monitor an individual’s precise location. They can also take over the functions of a phone installed with SmartLINK, causing deep stress to people forced to utilize the app. Ankle shackles also provoke additional anxiety, in part by stigmatizing users.
These “alternatives to detention,” as they are officially called, are managed by the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), slated to be consolidated into Release and Reporting Management, according to an ICE request for information from 2023. The goal was to “engage with a large portion of the 5.7 million individuals on the current non-detained docket,” which are people in immigration proceedings outside the detention system.
The plan was seemingly shelved. However as Wired first reported, on Nov. 6—the same day Trump was declared the winner of the election—ICE posted a request for information for contractors with “suitably large intake rooms” and with the “ability to perform mass-scale intakes as required by unforeseeable events.” By the end of fiscal year 2024 in September, 7.6 million individuals comprised the non-detained docket. If ICE’s intention is to revive its 2023 plans, a massive expansion of e-carceration may soon occur.
According to the Nov. 6 notice, the contractor would also be required to incorporate information from Hurricane Score, an AI algorithm that calculates the risk of a monitored individual absconding. The algorithm is inconsistent with federal policies governing the responsible use of AI, particularly when making “life-impacting decisions,” according to a letter sent by 140 civil rights organizations to former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting a ban on Hurricane Score and other AI tools.
Asked by Prism about ICE’s intention to substantially boost its surveillance arsenal, agency spokesperson Mike Alvarez said in an email that, like other federal agencies, ICE “maintains various contracts for a wide range of services.”
E-carceration is swelling. Still, the number of individuals currently wearing alternative to detention devices could be higher. As TRAC has noted, ICE figures are not reliable.
One company has overwhelmingly benefited from the e-carceration of immigrants: BI Inc., which has a $2.2 billion contract with ICE set to expire in July. The company is the agency’s sole provider of electronic monitoring devices. BI is also a subsidiary of the private prison corporation GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private prison companies that contracts with ICE to operate more than a dozen detention facilities nationwide. GEO Group donated $3.4 million to 2024 political campaigns, the largest recipient being the super PAC Make America Great Again. GEO Group also spent $1.03 million in lobbying last year, directing a third, or $340,000, at “immigration enforcement and alternatives to detention.”
TITLE: Trump Admin Announces Plans to Build Database of Migrant DNA
https://futurism.com/trump-database-migrant-dna
EXCERPTS: Trump is…laying the groundwork for a massive genetic surveillance campaign targeting migrants.
That's according to analysis by award-winning National Security journalist Spencer Ackerman, who writes that "along with the attorney general, the secretary of homeland security will 'fulfill the requirements of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005,' according to the 'Securing Our Borders' executive order," referencing one of the numerous presidential actions targeting migrants signed by Trump on his first day back.
"In other words," Ackerman continues, "[the] DHS and the Justice Department will create and manage a migrant DNA database."
Ackerman notes that the measure to harvest migrant DNA seems "reminiscent of the biometrics database created under the Bush administration for Muslim travelers known as NSEERS," a similarly troubling moment in American history which some of Trump's executive orders are predicated on.
More recently, Biden's approach to the immigration crisis was also a decidedly invasive one, thanks in part to the Customs and Border Patrol's CBP One app which rolled out in October of 2020. In 2023, that app got a controversial update: a Visa-lottery system for hopeful migrants to schedule meetings for processing into the United States.
That app came with a host of privacy concerns, not least of which was the harvesting of applicant biometric and geolocation data for case processing.
Rather than delete that data after an individual has been processed, as the TSA claims it does, the DHS collects it into two federal databases — the Traveler Verification System and Automated Targeting System. CBP One has since been shut down by Trump, canceling thousands of applicant's appointments and stranding them at the border, but the personal data its collected is likely still being held by the federal government.
It's likewise been reported that, as of 2020, the DHS has already captured data from over 1.5 million immigrants crossing the border in its Combined DNA Index System. That DNA harvesting program is laundered as a law enforcement index — though the collection includes hundreds of thousands of migrants who have only ever been administratively detained, and have never been charged with a crime.
Many immigrants report not being informed of the DNA collection, believing DNA swabs to be medical procedures, despite the DHS' internal guidelines mandating disclosure.
While Trump isn't the only electected official pushing to harvest the DNA of every incoming immigrant, his influence will certainly have the most impact as his nominees shape their agencies to his dystopian image.