Trump Inherited a Booming Anti-Migrant Industry

It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points — namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.

But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?

In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.

And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.

In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.

In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.

The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.

The Bipartisan Border Consensus

In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.

From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one — maybe three years old — jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than four million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.

About a year later, on January 20th, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.

Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.

The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.

“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.

“You’re losing money?” I ask.

“Every day,” he replies.

It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake — except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.

Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.

Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.

On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which — for me — climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a mega-drought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.

The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.

“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.

“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.

Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.

It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.