Theme: predatory capital
Where private wealth is built on the apparatus — shareholders, executive compensation, defense contractors, family business interests.
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Inside Dilley
Sworn declarations from detained children and parents at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — the nation's only family detention facility, run by CoreCivic and reopened in 2025 — describe vomit-inducing food, denied medical care, intimidating guards, and a four-year-old who developed a black eye after hitting his head, his potential concussion left untreated.
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The Sons' New Drone Company
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are backers of a new drone company explicitly targeting Pentagon contracts; the company would profit from defense procurement decisions made by the administration of which their father is the head.
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The Pool
An Associated Press investigation, drawn from 911 calls and detainee accounts, reports that staff at the nation's largest ICE detention facility — Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in Texas — placed bets on which detainee would next die by suicide; Camp East Montana sits on the site of a World War II Japanese American internment camp.
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The Procurement Officer's Former Employer
The federal official directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention procurement is a former GEO Group executive who, by ethics waiver, was permitted to award contracts to his prior employer — a company poised to receive tens of billions of dollars over four years through detention contracts often awarded without competitive bids.
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The Customer in Question
CoreCivic's CEO described Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a 'customer' on a 2025 earnings call; investors on the same calls expressed frustration that the agency's record detention numbers were not yet high enough. ICE revenues for the contractor more than doubled that year.
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One Hundred and Fifty Leases
WIRED reviewed federal records showing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has secretly negotiated more than 150 new office leases and expansions across nearly every U.S. state — many near schools, medical offices, and places of worship — with the General Services Administration explicitly asked to bypass usual procurement procedures and conceal listings under 'national security' pretext.
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Fifty-Nine Million, Conservatively
A Chicago Tribune review of court filings, databases, and public records puts the federal cost of Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration enforcement surge in Illinois, at at least fifty-nine million dollars over four months — a back-of-the-envelope figure DHS declined to confirm or contest.
2026
2025
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Cash Bonuses for Locating Immigrants
An ICE procurement document reviewed by The Intercept solicits private contractors to locate immigrants in batches of ten thousand at a time, with monetary bonuses paid based on how many targets are successfully tracked down — the contractor model resembles a plan circulated earlier in the year by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.