Poll after poll shows that public opinion has turned a corner, with more Americans supportive of the abolition of ICE than not – including 15% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats.
After all, the public is watching something truly heinous unfold – people are being rounded up from schools, workplaces, citizens, white citizens at that, are getting shot in the street for standing up for their neighbors. Children, like 5-year-old Liam Ramos, are being kidnapped from school.
Yet, except for the left leaning few, politicians on both sides of the aisle won’t pick up the mantra. Dick Durban called for ICE to be “reformed,” and Corey Booker made a video about how more bodycams and “oversight” are the solution – as though having the videos Renee Good or Alex Pretti being killed mattered for curbing ICE belligerence. Seven House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a spending bill that included $1.6 trillion package for DHS, later stopped by the Senate.
The question then presents itself of why despite shifting public opinions, our politicians are so hesitant to act to abolish this monstrosity.
The answer in part, is that ICE, while extraordinarily costly to all working people, regardless of documentation, is hugely, and I mean, grotesquely, profitable to the corporations fueling this deportation regime and the politicians backing it.
A new report published by Our Revolution aggregated the contributions of three “deportation oligarchs” to politicians ahead of the 2024 election cycle. Private prison contractors GEO Group and Core Civic gave an aggregate of $3,521,000 and $740,663 respectively, of which 90% went to Republicans, while CSI Aviation, which runs deportation flights, gave 100% of $442,826 contributions to the GOP.
These three alone gave $4.7 million in campaign contributions, received about a billion in government contracts, and are expected to profit $11,000 for every $1 they spent. That’s an 11,000% return on investment.
In other words, the tremendous human cost we’re witnessing, the millions of people who are living in fear each time they leave home to go to school or to work are being brutalized for a cash return. The thousands of people who are currently incarcerated, separated from children, from partners, from everything they’ve known indefinitely is a cold-blooded money-making operation.
This is a for-profit ethnic cleansing, and it was always intended to be. Pam Bondi, US Attorney General under Trump, was a lobbyist for GEO group for years before she joined this administration. GEO group’s stocks doubled in the first week of Trump’s administration.
Henry Cuellar, one of aforementioned 7 Democrats who voted for the failed house bill to increase DHS funding, also received substantial campaign contributions from GEO group—it’s one of his top five donors according to Open Secrets.
This isn’t just a Trump thing or even just an ICE thing – private contractors have been around offering carceral services for decades. GEO group, notorious for human rights violations in their facilities, got its start running carceral facilities directed to the criminal legal system.
While ICE is absolutely an escalation of the violence on our streets, as elucidated in Victor Ray’s piece for Group Threat last week, Black Americans have long faced the same brutalities in this nation’s prisons, and at the hands of our run-of-the-mill cops: George Floyd was killed within a ten-minute drive of Alex Pretty and Renee Good.
And while the Our Revolution report documents the tremendous greed driving this industry – it takes a narrow view of who is profiting from the deportation machine.
Beyond the so-called “Deportation Oligarchs” many other corporations within the economy also benefit. Big Tech is a major culprit. The government supplies half of the business for Palantir, which has received more than $900 million in federal contracts, with which it built an “Immigration Operating System” for ICE. Palantir creates maps that spell-out deportation targets and offers a “confidence score” on a person’s address.
The dragnet created violates every individual’s right to privacy, citizens too. The ACLU warns that this surveillance tech could easily be used for systematic repression of voices of dissent.
Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, has seen his government contracts grow steadily over the decades starting with $4.4 million in 2009 and a little over half a billion in 2025. In 2025 the company’s stocks surged. On their payroll are Republicans and Democrats – Kamala Harris received $123,424 in campaign funds from them alone.
Notably, Palantir also made “hit lists” of Palestinians for the Israeli military. It is striking that among seven democrats who voted along with Republicans for the Homeland Security bill, all have AIPAC as a major donor – though this cannot be isolated as a determining factor, given the ubiquity of Israeli support among both parties in both houses of congress.
ICE also relies on other technologies developed through the sequester of Palestinians, including Cellebrite, which makes hardware and software that can crack into phones and Paragon, which is Israeli spyware.
The story of capital profiting off the lives of Black and brown people is of course a global one. It’s a continuation of what DuBois wrote in Color and Democracy in 1944 – North American and European leaders globally, see “the majority of men…mainly as sources of profit.”
G4S one of the largest security firms in the world, who sequester Palestinians in the West Bank, beat-down protestors at Ferguson, and who I witnessed incarcerate people on prisons in islands in the Greek Aegean have a $1 billion ICE contract.
Profits from ICE also go to agencies that are more ubiquitous, that many of us use every day. Amazon hosts the database that ICE uses to target immigrants and Hewlitt Packard, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Motorola, all have contracts with ICE.
Capitalism profits by limiting freedoms – sequestering people, shuttling them to other countries, surveilling them, is business.
That is why, despite copious evidence that expenditure on border violence does not stop migration, $409 billion spent by Democrats and Republicans since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security to 2023, with each administration adding billions to the tally. That’s why Democrats and Republicans both regurgitated the idea that immigrants were inherently dangerous, despite this being totally unfounded (and extraordinarily racist). Why even though immigrants are net benefits to our communities, as study after study after study show, paying their taxes and using little in the form of government services, our deportation apparatus grew and grew.
The point of this behemoth which the Trump administration has poured another $170 billion into, which it wants to pour even more into with this latest bill, is profitable – there are people with money willing to spend it on political campaigns and waiting, on the other side of elections, for what they see as their just desserts even if it comes from pulling children nursing from their mother’s breast.
Just as the profits of ICE are being thought off too narrowly, so too are its costs – which admittedly deserves its own separate piece.
Immigrants exist in every sector of the US economy, and the goal of ethnic cleansing takes us out of it – we all lose when people are being hounded and when they cannot contribute to our communities as they always have. The economic costs of their forced removal are almost unfathomable, before we get to the emotional and human costs of this entire awful system.
What’s more, it is those who identify as immigrants who are leading the charge against the demolition of the United States through these very policies – it is Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, Delia Ramirez, Zohran Mamdani, and candidates like Darializa Chevalier who are calling for the abolition of ICE. Who are recognizing that enough is enough.
As we think about reform, we have to go beyond abolishing the discrete parts of this and instead recognize that democracy, as Egyptian activist Nawal El-Saadawi once put it so clearly, cannot survive under Capitalism. We need to consider a socialist alternative and abolish the profit motive that ever made any of what I’ve written here seem reasonable to anyone.