DHS says it just deported a charter plane full of Chinese immigrants
The Biden administration has deported a chartered flight of Chinese nationals back to China, marking its second such removal this year.
Straight Arrow News
The companies quietly running the federal government’s immigration detention and deportation system are anticipating a potentially massive payday should Donald Trump return to the White House.
Trump has promised a “mass deportation” that would round up millions of immigrants living in the country unlawfully to detain and deport them – an effort that could take 10 years and cost nearly a trillion dollars, according to the American Immigration Council.
The federal government already relies on an intricate network of for-profit companies to execute its immigration enforcement. To meet the increased demand, experts say, it would need to scale-up up those private partnerships.
“With a mass deportation plan, you need a mass detention plan,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “We will likely see an attempt to dramatically expand the detention apparatus to hold people they would deport.”
The template can already be found at the border.
The Department of Homeland Security has more than a decade of experience using private contractors to set up outdoor detention facilities for recent migrants. The Department of Health and Human Services has set up similar “tent cities” to temporarily house unaccompanied migrant children. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the DHS umbrella, uses contractors for nearly every step of the immigration enforcement process, from transportation to detention and deportation.
“A large-scale deportation machine happening in the interior is a strategy that [DHS] is well-equipped to do,” said Linda Corchado, an El Paso, Texas-based immigration attorney who defended detained immigrants during the Trump administration.
While a reliance on the private sector has enabled both Democrat and Republican administrations to quickly scale up detention and deportation capacity, government watchdogs say the contracts can come with drawbacks, including overspending and a lack of oversight. In the past, auditors found deficiencies and, in some cases, substandard conditions in contractor-run detention facilities and shelters.
A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said in an email that the agency conducts “multi-layered oversight” of its contractors to “ensure noncitizens are treated humanely.”
HHS didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
The risk is that private contractors will be “motivated by the bottom line and not motivated by the care,” said Vicki Gaubeca, associate director of U.S. Immigration and Border Policy for Human Rights Watch. “They’re going to try to cut corners whenever possible.”
Immigration enforcement is ‘big business’
Corporations with federal contracts for security, transportation, detention and deportations – worth millions or billions of dollars – would likely reap the largest rewards in an expansion of immigration enforcement, experts told USA TODAY.
The players include publicly traded detention center operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic; privately held companies such as MVM Inc., which buses immigrants between detention sites; and charter flight companies such as CSI Aviation Services that supply planes to fly immigrants to their home countries.
Even as the Biden-Harris administration ended the practice of using private contractors to run federal prisons, DHS awarded contracts to the same companies for immigrant detention, GEO Group and CoreCivic among them.
In its most recent quarterly earnings call with investors, executives at GEO Group signaled the company is standing by for a possible Trump presidency and policy shift that could boost payments to its 17 detention centers under contract with ICE. Those federal contracts are worth roughly $1 billion annually.
“We have a total of 10,000 beds at several idle Secure Services facilities that we believe are well-suited to support ICE’s mission,” James Black, GEO’s head of Secure Services, which holds contracts with ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service, said on the call.
Another GEO executive told analysts that if a Trump administration called for rapid increases in deportation flights, the company has the capability to scale up the security services it provides for CSI Aviation, among the top air contractors for ICE.
Representatives from GEO Group didn’t respond to requests for comment.
CoreCivic representatives recently told investors that Election Day will be a significant fork in the road for their business, which depends on federal contracts.
In an earnings call, CoreCivic executives told analysts they were idling the company’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley through a 90-day window that would extend past Election Day. The detention center held women and children before the Biden-Harris administration canceled CoreCivic’s $150 million contract in June.
“We’re keeping all our options open,” said President and CEO Damon Hininger.
The ICE spokesperson said that immigration detention is “non-punitive,” and the agency detains non-citizens only where required by law.
Detention contracts offer flexibility and the opportunity “to procure beds at a reduced rate,” the spokesperson said, “thereby saving taxpayer money.”
Former Trump administration officials say a mass deportation would require a ramp-up of detention capacity with the help of the U.S. military, local governments and private contractors.
“You are going to need initial build-up, either through private contractors or county jails,” said Mark Morgan, who served as acting head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration. “That dovetails into family residential centers – those need to be brought back.”
Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesman, said the company plays a “valued but limited role” in the nation’s immigration system and has worked for both Democrat and Republican administrations.
“It’s solely at our government partners’ discretion when, where and how they want to work with us,” he said.
Congress currently funds ICE to hold 41,500 people in detention each day. The number of beds funded per day peaked around 55,000 during the Trump administration.
Deporting 1 million people per year, the American Immigration Council estimates, would require ICE to increase its detention capacity by a factor of 24.
“It’s big business,” said Gaubeca, of Human Rights Watch.
Contracts to care for and monitor teens, children
One of the Biden-Harris administration’s largest immigration contractors was Mobile, Alabama-based Rapid Deployment Inc., which in 2021 secured a contract to house unaccompanied migrant children on Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas. The company set up the largest of more than a dozen unlicensed “emergency” shelters for HHS – a contract that would eventually be valued at $4.8 billion.
Despite allegations by federal whistleblowers of inadequate case management and poor conditions for children, the company took in $3.5 billion before the facility closed in 2023, according to the Federal Data Procurement System. An HHS Office of the Inspector General audit found lapses in children’s case management and alleged “whistleblower chilling” at the Fort Bliss site – but didn’t name Rapid Deployment in its report.
Rapid Deployment CEO Bruce Wagner didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The company’s attorney referred USA TODAY to HHS, which also didn’t respond.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has decried “a lack of transparency” in the HHS unaccompanied children’s program that “allows contractors to hide in the shadows.”
“Private contractors receive billions of taxpayer dollars to help the federal government care for unaccompanied minors and match them with sponsors – but contractors’ activity is largely shrouded in secrecy,” Grassley told USA TODAY in an emailed statement.
Companies have faced public backlash over government contracts, too. After a public outcry, a company that ran an “influx” shelter for unaccompanied minors during the Trump administration canceled its plans for an initial public stock offering and changed its name.
In 2019, Caliburn International faced allegations that thousands of children were subjected to lengthy detention and “prison-like” rules at a shelter run by a subsidiary in Homestead, Florida. At the time, the federal shelter was the only one for migrant children run by a for-profit company, and immigrant advocates targeted it relentlessly.
Acuity International, the rebranded company, won a five-year contract with ICE in 2022 worth $72 million. The Biden-Harris administration quietly ended the youth monitoring program earlier this year and canceled the contract in August.
Acuity International didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
One-way tickets mean big bucks
At the end of any deportation process, the final step comes when detained immigrants are marched in shackles up stairs, onto a jet bound for their home country.
Those one-way tickets on ICE Air are big money-makers for federal contractors like Classic Air Charter, a tiny Florida-based charter broker that landed nearly $800 million in contracts from ICE last year.
Company representatives, including owner Dan Carson, didn’t respond to inquiries from USA TODAY.
The Biden administration is on track to record 1,600 deportation flights this year ‒ all of them charter flights, according to Witness at the Border, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks deportation flights daily.
With Trump targeting deportations in the millions, a second administration would have to increase the number of flights dramatically.
“ICE doesn’t really have any of its own planes,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “It relies on private transportation to carry out removals, and it’s a service that isn’t easy to scale up rapidly.”
Classic Air Charter has been the target of watchdog investigations by the Center for Human Rights and the University of Washington. That group uses flight data to track travel by Classic Air and competitor CSI Aviation.
ICE pays more than $8,500 per flight hour on the chartered 737s. The brokers work with major subcontractors Swift Air and World Atlantic Airlines, which the Center for Human Rights found frequently switch from deporting migrants to shuttling VIPs, rock stars and collegiate sports teams.
Angelina Godoy, the center’s director, said the fixed-based operators and subcontractors have tried to obscure their ties to the flight brokers – and that’s potentially bad news for both migrants and U.S. taxpayers.
“Anytime there’s government secrecy, it’s rife for abuse and there’s no transparency into the condition of these migrants,” Godoy said. “The lack of transparency using our tax dollars and the degree of secrecy involved with deportation is alarming.”
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