Private contractors in US eye windfall from Trump’s push to deport migrants 

As a central part of its agenda, the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to round up, detain and deport millions of people living in the United States without documentation.

While immigrant rights groups view those plans with alarm, private companies that offer immigration-related services see something else: a potential financial windfall.

One of those businesses is the GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies.

In a telephone call with investors after the November 5 election, founder George Zoley hailed Trump’s victory as a “political sea change”. The company’s stock price has surged by nearly 73 percent in the weeks since.

“The Geo Group was built for this unique moment in our history and the opportunities it will bring,” Zoley told the investors.

CoreCivic, another provider of detention services, saw its stock price increase by more than 50 percent during the same period. The stock price for Palantir, a tech firm that works with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), increased by more than 44 percent.

As spending on immigration enforcement and border security has ramped up in the US, experts say the private sector has sought to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities, pitching everything from surveillance tech and biometric scanning to detention facilities.

“There is this framing of immigration as a ‘problem’ that governments need to ‘manage’,” Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist specialising in migration and human rights, told Al Jazeera.

“And the private sector has stepped in and said, ‘Well, if you have a problem, we can offer a solution.’ And the solution is a drone or a robo-dog or artificial intelligence.”

‘Driving the enforcement process’

While nativist attacks on immigrants have long been at the centre of Trump’s politics, they reached new heights during his 2024 campaign.

While touring the country to mobilise voters, Trump promised to deport millions of “vicious criminals” and “animals” that his campaign blamed for everything from housing shortages to long hospital waits.

Since his election win, Trump has confirmed on social media that he plans to declare a national emergency to carry out his plans, including through the use of “military assets”.

Agencies such as ICE will also play a central role in those efforts. Experts say they can draw from a vast trove of data and tech programmes to assist them with compiling and selecting “targets” for removal.

“Probably the biggest development that we’ve seen in the immigration enforcement space has been the use of technology, data and information to drive the enforcement process,” said Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who researches geography and immigration.

“That’s been true across Democratic and Republican administrations.”

Contractors such as the tech firm Oracle have built data systems for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and subordinate agencies. Other companies offer surveillance and monitoring systems.

In 2020, for instance, the GEO Group announced that a subsidiary named BI Incorporated, first founded to monitor cattle in the late 1970s, had won a five-year contract for the government’s Intensive Supervision and Appearance Program (ISAP), which tracks immigrants using technology like ankle monitors.

The deal was worth an estimated $2.2bn.

Logistical hurdles

Tech firms have also integrated themselves firmly in the world of border security.

Companies like Boeing and the Israeli firm Elbit Systems have helped install detection technology on the US border with Mexico, including radar systems, panoramic cameras and fibre-optic systems that can detect vibrations on the ground.

“If you go to a private-sector exposition, you walk into a big hall, and you see all this tech being literally sold off to governments,” Molnar said.

She added that, while large firms such as Microsoft, Palantir and Google often dominate conversations around the integration of tech and immigration enforcement, small- and medium-sized companies also offer services.

“I think there is going to be an exponential increase of investment into border technologies. There is an open-door invitation for the private sector into the Oval Office,” Molnar explained.

But Kocher said companies that can help with basic logistical issues such as staffing may be in the best position to benefit from Trump’s second term.

After all, the Department of Homeland Security estimates there are 11 million “unauthorised immigrants” living in the US as of 2022. ICE employs only about 20,000 personnel.

“The only way the Trump administration is going to enforce its immigration agenda is through finding a way to get more staff, and technology is not going to do that,” Kocher said.

“They have millions of people that they could pick up today if they had the staff. They could just go knocking on the doors of the addresses that they already have all day long.”

Private firms could also face burgeoning demand for immigrant detention space, an area where they play an outsized role.

“Private prisons are a small part of the correctional system. Only 8 percent of people who are incarcerated in the US are held in a privately run facility,” said Bianca Tylek, director of the nonprofit Worth Rises, which tracks the role the private sector plays in the US criminal justice and immigration systems.

“However, in the immigration detention system, more than 80 percent of people who are detained are detained in a private facility.”

She added that such facilities, run by companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, have “terrible reputations for human rights violations”.

Watchdog groups have catalogued issues such as poor sanitation, overcrowding, racial abuse and sexual assault by guards, as well as a lack of medical services.

One 2018 report from the American Immigration Council found that many privately run facilities are located in remote areas far from legal resources. It also noted that migrants were detained for “significantly longer” periods of time if they were in private detention centres.

There are also doubts over whether existing detention centres will be able to accommodate detainees on the scale Trump has envisioned.

Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner Trump recently named as his homeland security adviser, has previously said mass deportations will require “an extremely large holding area” capable of detaining “50, 60, 70 thousand illegal aliens while you are waiting to send them someplace”.

But it is unclear if private firms will be able to fill such a gargantuan need on the timeline sought by the administration. Trump has said he plans to start his deportation plan “on day one”.

“Building new facilities doesn’t happen overnight,” Tylek said. “Will they break ground on new facilities? Potentially. Will they break ground and be able to finish a project within the administration’s tenure? Potentially. Will they do it this year? No.”

In the shorter term, she said ICE and private contractors may try to maximise capacity in current facilities or find additional beds they can lease out in places like county jails.

“I think they might even buy some kind of existing structures and turn them into pretty deplorable housing,” she explained.

Tylek added that contractors could even take advantage of the fact that immigrant detention centres have lower security standards than prisons and jails, in order to repurpose places like hotels and warehouses to hold people.

‘A perfect laboratory’

Scholars say the heated rhetoric around immigration in the US often works to the advantage of companies profiting from immigration enforcement.

By painting all undocumented migrants as threats — regardless of their reasons for travelling to the US — politicians increase the demand for services to deter, detain and expel them.

Molnar also pointed out that not all undocumented people are in the US illegally. Asylum seekers are allowed, under international law, to cross borders if they fear persecution.

“There’s this conflation between crime and immigration, national security and immigration, and that furthers the derogation of rights that people do have under an international legal system,” Molnar said.

But the increasing demand for private immigration services is not limited to the United States. According to a report by the rights watchdog Amnesty International, the global market for border and immigration security is expected to reach up to $68bn by 2025.

Painting migration as a threat or even an “invasion”, as Trump has, also creates circumstances where governments can deploy enforcement techniques that might draw more scrutiny otherwise.

“The border is this perfect laboratory. It’s opaque. It’s discretionary. It’s this frontier where anything goes, so it’s ripe for tech projects to be tested out and then repurposed in other spaces,” Molnar said.

At the receiving end are people who have often been on harrowing journeys in an effort to find a better life or escape violence and persecution.

“A lot of people reflect on the dehumanising feeling that comes from being reduced to a fingerprint or an eye scan, and not being seen as a full human being with a complex story,” she added.

“When you talk to people who have faced drone surveillance or biometric data collection in refugee camps, there are these themes of disenfranchisement and discrimination that really come to light.”