Pepperballs and tear gas during encounters have become commonplace under the Trump administration. Brutish raids are emblematic of an immigration policy characterized by militarism, enabled by dysfunctional oversight, and reliant on fear as a deterrent.
And you might wonder why there has been so much more ICE visibility under Trump. Much of it stems from the tripling of the agency’s budget under the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”. Executives at CoreCivic and GEO Group, private detention companies, relish their great fortune on company calls. “Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment,” said Damon Hininger, GEO Group CEO, during an August 7th call. An investment they made prior has paid off.
CoreCivic and GEO Group, along with their subsidiaries and executives, have contributed nearly a combined $2.8 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Large donations followed by lucrative deals—a red flag for unethical interactions between government and private industry. And indeed, CoreCivic and GEO Group saw a roughly 10 and 5 percent increase in second-quarter revenue, respectively, between 2024 and 2025. This sequence reveals that behind the influx in immigration control is not a response to crime but rather a repayment to contractors that supported Trump during his campaign.
Along with supercharging ICE funding, the Trump administration has implemented a hefty quota of 3,000 arrests daily. Such a quota encourages rounding up individuals recklessly and without regard for their actual immigration status or previous criminal record. The result is that at least 170 U.S. citizens have already been detained. Through this quota, the immigration system contradicts the objective of safety by endangering the citizens it is meant to protect.
Despite the Trump administration framing arrests and raids as a means of targeting violent crime, the statistics say otherwise. As of June, 93% of ICE detainees have never been convicted of a violent crime, yet ICE unleashes its military violence upon them regardless. The Guardian describes one ICE operation on an apartment complex in Chicago; it included an “air assault from helicopters” and “flash-bang grenades to clear apartments”.
Although the militancy of ICE catches eyes on the streets, other questionable activity occurs behind the scenes. ICE has contracted Palantir for $30 million to create ImmigrationOS—an AI system that mainly tracks self-deportations, identifies the priority of targets, and manages the immigration lifecycle. The AI uses data like criminal histories, immigration records, and social indicators in order to evaluate the priority of targets. One issue with this approach to immigration control is the creation of systemic biases—seen previously with COMPAS, a software that generates risk ratings of defendants and was found to be biased against Black people. Further problematic is that Stephen Miller, the lead planner of the new immigration policy, is financially invested in Palantir, with disclosed shares holding a value up to $250,000. Miller’s deployment of Palantir reveals how ICE policy is shaped to the personal benefit of administrators. Communities, meanwhile, are sacrificed to a company with a disastrous track record.
Back in the detention centers, the breakdown of oversight may enable poor conditions and negligence to mar the lives of detainees. The Department of Homeland Security under Trump has moved to essentially cease the operations of the Office of the Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. These offices were pivotal to oversight of ICE detention.
The Trump administration’s destruction of oversight measures, coupled with their use of predictive technology and excessive force, is an exploitative combination. It allows for the abuse of ICE’s military-like capabilities while inhibiting accountability. This is a troublesome reality considering the issues centers have with maintaining standards. In fact, a report found that 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody were preventable. In 88 percent of the deaths, the medical workers made wrong or incomplete diagnoses. This serves to highlight the medical risks detainees face in ICE custody, while also reflecting upon the overall hazardous living conditions in ICE facilities.
Whether intentional or inadvertent, the conditions in ICE facilities act to deter border crossings and induce fear in immigrants. Experts say that a different method may be leveraged to discourage the move too: family separations. A ProPublica report explores the new wave of separations. There has been a stark increase in the number of children sent to federal shelters since Trump’s inauguration. Nowadays, separations occur frequently following simple interactions, such as the 150 children found to have been detained following traffic stops in the ProPublica analysis.
The administration has also implemented a more extensive vetting process, claiming that it is for child safety. The result of this policy, however, is that the average stay of kids in shelters has moved from 1 month under the Biden administration to 6 months under Trump. It is an approach that broadcasts hostility to all immigrant demographics since children are supposed to be afforded protections, yet they are held for an excruciating period of time.
The vetting process collects extensive information on potential sponsors, including expanded DNA testing and fingerprinting of everyone in the sponsor’s household. This invasive procedure is used to find other illegal immigrants. And indeed, ProPublica reports, there have been hopeful sponsors who present for an in-person interview, only to be detained due to their presence illegally in the country. In this sense, the children are used to lure out the illegal immigrants seeking to aid the young immigrants. Consequently, sponsors may dread coming forth out of fear for their own safety.
Collectively, the new immigration policy has proven to be severely misaligned with the purported purposes of safety and combating illegal activity. Its escalation, spurred by financial interests, has brought devastating violence and fear. The current administration flouts safety in the country that it is supposed to protect. And we have seen the painful consequences.
Renee Nicole Good, mother of three, shot dead in Minneapolis. Based on what we have laid out, her case was inevitable. An inevitable product in a system that desires terror and brutality.
