One hundred days ago, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA), which launched a dangerous and sweeping escalation of indiscriminate U.S. immigration enforcement. The legislation allocates over $170 billion for a violent, tech-fueled crackdown that is criminalizing immigrants, tearing apart families, and dramatically expanding the carceral state under the banner of border security.
With its help, immigration enforcement has now reached record-breaking levels. The Trump Administration has already deported more than 400,000 people, with nearly 25,000 arrested in September 2025 alone. Today, there are at least 59,000 people in immigration detention, the most since Congress created Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003, and 71% of whom have no criminal record. ICE predicts that more than 100,000 people will be detained by 2029.
OBBA makes that horrifying prediction a near certainty. It devotes $47 billion to building a border wall and $45 billion to expanding detention capacity. The law authorizes the development of a broad surveillance infrastructure and encourages mass arrests and deportations. Thousands of families have already been separated, with parents and children sent to facilities hundreds of miles apart. Many may never see each other again. Entire communities are being hollowed out.
What makes this moment particularly dystopian is not just the scale of the infrastructure being built, but who is building it, and why. While the legislation is dressed with overtures to national security, the real beneficiaries of this new world are not everyday taxpaying Americans, but its architects. And for that, we follow the money to understand the biggest groups profiting from and enabling today’s ruthless immigration agenda.
The Prison Industry
Today, 90% of people detained are held in facilities run by private prison corporations. The two largest — GEO Group and CoreCivic — employ nearly 30,000 people and brought in $4.3 billion in revenue last year. Far from passive beneficiaries of OBBA, both corporations were critical players in its passage, spending a combined $3 million lobbying the federal government to increase appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security.
Since their emergence, these prison profiteers have looked to immigration enforcement as their business anchor. In fact, the first private prisons were immigration detention centers. But with public animus against private prisons solidifying in recent years, they see the Administration’s mass deportation agenda as a white knight. George Zoley, executive chairman of GEO Group, called this moment an “unprecedented opportunity,” while Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, described it as “truly one of the most exciting periods in my career.” Both corporations have reopened previously closed facilities with enthusiasm.
Many of these corporations are already notorious for their profit-gouging and cost-cutting. For example, when CoreCivic reopened California City detention center in the desert east of Los Angeles this year, they did little to prepare to receive and detain people again. Filthy, hazardous conditions, rusting pipes, and limited supplies make for wider profit margins, but people detained there call the facility “hell on earth.” Conditions across ICE detention centers, public and private, are just barbaric, leading to disease, injury, and death. At least 16 people have died in ICE custody this year.
But rather than improving conditions in their facilities, these prison profiteers are investing in expansions of their businesses to capitalize on the opportunities the new policies have ushered in. Earlier this year, GEO Group announced that it would be investing $70 million across its electronic monitoring, immigration detention, and deportation transportation business lines, with the expectation that it could return as much as a billion dollars annually.
As the money pours in, corporations are now flooding the market, raising questions about the qualifications of new bidders and appropriateness of the awards. For instance, Acquisition Logistics, a tiny Virginia-based corporation that has never been awarded a federal contract for more than $16 million, recently won a $1.2 billion contract to build a massive tent encampment in Texas that officials say will be the nation’s largest immigration detention complex. And it is not the only corporation with questionable qualifications approved to bid on contracts funded by OBBA: two-year-old ResponseAI Solutions is another hoping to secure contracts for medical services, security, and logistical support to detention facilities.
This growing network of detention contractors profits from every vile motion of immigration enforcement: CRS Chemicals when tear gas flies, Axon when a body cam turns on, Safariland when a baton is drawn, ADS Inc. when shackles lock, and so many more. Every act of enforcement, every step of the deportation process, as well as every aspect of life inside the detention center, becomes a transaction.
Big Tech and Surveillance
None of this would be possible without Big Tech, which ICE uses to find, track, and hunt down immigrants from the border to our nation’s heartland.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) uses autonomous surveillance systems powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to identify people crossing the border. Autonomous security towers manufactured by Elbit Systems and Andruil — which recently announced a partnership with Meta to advance AI on the battlefield — currently stand watch over 30% of the U.S.-Mexico border. OBBA allocates more than $6 billion to expand this type of border security and screening technology.
For its part, ICE pulls data from an extensive and growing set of sources that range from Palantir’s surveillance intelligence to Verisk’s insurance claim records. It depends on data analysis and cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, case management software provided by Oracle, and the censorship of community warning apps by Apple. It also relies on private corporations like BI, a subsidiary of GEO Group, for the electronic monitoring of immigrants, which has skyrocketed in recent years. These are the types of public-private partnerships that the OBBA and the Administration are working to strengthen.
State and Local Agencies
It’s not just private corporations vying for a piece of the windfall — state and local governments are too and there is plenty for them. Existing detention centers are not big enough to support the Administration’s deportation quotas. Even before OBBA was signed into law, nearly half of all ICE facilities were over capacity for at least one night of the year.
With federal funds flowing, states and local authorities willing to be complicit in the Administration's deportation machine are jumping in, renting beds to the federal government for a handsome return. They are repurposing existing prison facilities — such as the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska or the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana — as well as offering space to construct soft-sided temporary facilities, like “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida or the “Lonestar Lockup” in Texas. And these projects present major windfalls for local architects, engineers, contractors, and security firms.
While there has been some organizing pushing back, many have struggled to make lasting inroads. The Miccosukee Tribe and Friends of the Everglades sued the federal government to close Alligator Alcatraz — where people are detained inside fence cages in disturbing and vile conditions that raise concerns about cruel and unusual punishment — on environmental grounds. The suit resulted in a preliminary injunction to wind down operations in August, but an appellate court reversed the decision in September. For now, Alligator Alcatraz remains open, and five other states are interested in building tent detention centers.
Agents and Officers
With record funding, ICE is now the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Yet, OBBA aims to add another 10,000 agents — on top of the 20,000 already employed by ICE — with an allocation of more than $4 billion for hiring and training personnel. To help hire and retain agents, OBBA set aside an additional $2 billion for retention, hiring, and performance bonuses. A mere 100 days after OBBA became law, the ramp-up of personnel resembles a wartime military-scale buildup. Just recently, ICE reported receiving as many as 150,000 applications within just a week.
The bottom line is that OBBA, and the mass deportation agenda it supports, is not about safety. Research consistently shows that immigrants — both documented and undocumented — commit crimes at far lower rates compared to citizens. In fact, communities with more immigrants experience less violent crime. And perhaps what is most frustrating is that all those benefitting from today’s enforcement violence know this even as they transparently flock to build minimum security tent encampments to hold what they claim are “dangerous” people. It is all a lie designed to clawback whatever wealth and power was finally being redistributed, if ever so slightly, by decades of progressive policy.