This month’s GOP spending bill included a $485 million budget hike for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That likely represents a windfall for the many private vendors profiting from the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown — including the shadowy aviation contractors carrying out ICE’s deportation flights.
ICE uses private air charter companies — in some cases the same as those that ferry professional sports teams across the country — to carry out its deportations at an extremely high cost. The three flights that carried migrants to El Salvador last week, despite a judge ordering the planes to turn back, likely cost the government upward of $8,000 per hour per aircraft.
At the center of this business, as a report this week from the Project on Government Oversight revealed, is a New Mexico firm that has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Donald Trump and GOP super PACs: CSI Aviation. Last year, the company won a $3.6 billion contract for the flights — although its main competitor, CIA-linked Classic Air Charter, says it was cheated out of the award and is challenging the decision in court.
Other subcontractors profiting off the mass deportation program include GEO Transit, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, the world’s largest private prison company and another key Trump donor, as well as GlobalX, the airline behind the recent flights to El Salvador, which has recently been mired in allegations of mistreating migrants on its planes. (GlobalX executives have said the company expects $65 million a year in revenue from its ICE contract.)
The billions that private companies are making from the flights throw into sharp relief the profiteering behind ICE’s deportation regime, where private air charter companies bring in enormous profits deporting immigrants with little oversight. And thanks to the GOP spending bill, that oversight may be further scaled back.
Despite their…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
