Clockwise from left: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, GEO Group’s George Zoley,
Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan)
A primer on the billionaire barons and corporate profiteers enabling ICE’s deportation apparatus
By Derek Seidman
Earlier this year, the U.S. Congress approved a massive increase in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including $45 billion for immigrant detention and $30 billion for recruitment and training, bonus pay, and additional facilities and vehicles. ICE’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year will be around $28 billion, up from $8 billion, making it “the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government,” according to the New York Times.
Corporations and billionaires across the U.S. have long profited from materially enabling ICE’s deportation apparatus. Now, with escalating attacks on immigrant workers and families and ramped-up ICE funding, corporations and oligarchs are set to cash in even more from lucrative contracts to supply ICE’s “Deportation-Industrial Complex” with everything from surveillance tech and airline transportation to cloud services and bank financing.
ICE and its Department of Homeland Security (DHS) parent agency contracts and subcontracts with hundreds of companies. Many of these are obscure and niche businesses, but a good number of these ICE contractors are also name-brand, consumer-facing corporations led by prominent executives and billionaires and powerful oligarchs.
In this post we name some of these corporate ICE profiteers and deportation barons — from Peter Thiel’s Palantir to Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, from GEO Group to Avelo Airlines, from Bank of America to AT&T — that everyone should know about. We also provide resources and links for further research into other ICE profiteers, including those with a presence in your own locale.
[Use the link below to see the entire layout of billionaires and corporate profiteers benefiting from ICE connections and investments and enabling ICE’s work.]
ICE Oligarchs + Corporate Profiteers
Palantir Technologies: Deportation Through Data
Palantir Technologies sits at the core of ICE’s deportation machine. Palantir mobilizes and weaponizes its data management software to help ICE locate, surveil and seize individuals. Perhaps more than any other corporation, Palantir is the critical data gathering tool, the indispensable anchor, that undergirds ICE’s war against immigrants.
Palantir was incorporated in 2003 by Peter Thiel, who is today worth $25.8 billion and serves as Palantir’s chairman. Thiel was part of the “Paypal Mafia” group that included figures like Elon Musk and David Sacks who went on to dominate Silicon Valley. Thiel is an arch-right libertarian and one of Big Tech’s top power brokers. He’s been a close backer of Vice President JD Vance, and Thiel’s network populates the new administration.
Palantir has always functioned as an arm of the U.S. militarist and policing apparatus, from the so-called “War on Terror” to the bipartisan war on immigrants. Its business model depends on gobbling up millions of dollars in government contracts. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, worth $15.6 billion, is open about Palantir’s goal of advancing a militarized US state aimed at western dominance — along with steady profits for Palantir.
Palantir is a corporation that creates and manages data software. ICE has worked with Palantir for nearly two decades. With Palantir’s software, ICE can track and integrate data on immigrants that drives its ability to monitor, capture and deport people. For example, during Barack Obama’s second presidential term, ICE awarded Palantir a $41 million contract to build and maintain an “Investigative Case Management” system that collects and organizes data culled from a massive surveillance network. “ICM allows ICE agents to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them,” wrote the Intercept in 2017.
Today, Palantir’s work for ICE is being expanded with a $30 million contract to build a new ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform.” According to the dystopian language of ICE’s contract with Palantir, ImmigrationOS will facilitate “Targeting and Enforcement Prioritization,” which includes streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens based on ICE enforcement priorities,” assist “Self-Deportation Tracking, which includes near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation,” and surveil the “Immigration Lifecycle Process,” which includes “streamlined end to end immigration lifecycle from identification to removal, with increased efficiency in deportation logistics.”
In exchange for its arming the U.S. state with advanced data systems to police and surveil, Palantir is massively cashing in. The Wall Street Journal reported that, all told, Palantir “received more than $322 million from government contracts in the first six months of 2025, a 12% increase from the same period two years earlier.” CEO Alex Karp has said he expects Palantir’s U.S. earnings to “grow 10-fold in the next five years.” The company’s government contracts and profits, and its share price, have boomed — surely to the delight of Peter Thiel, who owns tens of millions of shares of Palantir stock.
It’s critical to understand Palantir’s deportation profiteering as interlocked with a wider nexus of billionaire tech power lodged at the heart of the new administration. For example, Thiel’s and Palantir’s government-fueled profits have been openly assisted by Elon Musk — a longtime partner of Thiel — and Musk’s private equity investor ally Antonio Gracias at the Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE staff previously worked for Palantir and two others worked for other companies funded by Thiel, reports the New York Times.
But there are small cracks in the facade. Over a dozen former Palantir workers, including former software engineers and managers, recently shared a letter condemning the company for violating its own purported Code of Conduct around upholding democracy and preventing “discrimination, disinformation, and abuses of power.” This statement joins a growing movement of tech workers — like those active with #NoTechForIce and the Tech Workers Coalition — challenging the corporate weaponization of tech against workers, immigrants, and others.
GEO Group: Deportation Camp Profiteers
Like Palantir, GEO Group is at the center of ICE’s deportation apparatus. GEO oversees an empire of private prisons and transportation and digital monitoring infrastructure that, along with other corporations like CoreCivic, amounts to an archipelago of detention and deportation camps acting on the data surveillance performed by companies like Palantir.
GEO is ICE’s largest contractor, with a relationship that goes back over two decades. ICE contracts made up 43% of GEO’s revenue in 2023. According to information obtained by the ACLU, GEO today operates 100 facilities across the world, including 20 facilities under contract with ICE in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.
GEO’s business has boomed under the new administration. The company reported $636.2 million in revenue for the second quarter of 2025, a number that’s up 5% from last year and sure to keep growing. Zoley said ICE is now utilizing 20,000 beds, up from 15,000, which is the “highest level of ICE utilization in the company’s history” and represents “more than 1/3 of the current ICE detention levels,” estimated at 57,000 beds nationwide.
GEO is also salivating over new ICE contracts to digitally surveil immigrants through ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps, seeing this as a new front for the accumulation of profit. “While digital monitoring generates only about 14 percent of its $2.4 billion in annual revenue,” wrote the New York Times, GEO “has said its immigrant surveillance could more than double,” with “[p]rofit margins on the monitoring business hover at around 50 percent.”
Zoley has overseen GEO for four decades, stepping down as CEO in 2021 while transitioning to executive chairman. He recently told investors that the company was “uniquely positioned to assist [ICE] to meet its objectives.” Indeed, the investor call reads like a litany of GEO’s profiteering opportunities from ICE operations. Zoley discussed four new GEO “facilities,” including in New Jersey and Michigan, that “represent more than $240 million in combined annualized revenues.”
Zoley also discussed “alternatives to further assess ICE meeting its stated objectives,” such as “the potential acquisition or leasing of third-party-owned facilities” and entering into “teaming agreements with an established Department of Defense contractor to position our company to pursue potential procurements that may be issued for operational support services at military sites.” Zoley also noted that GEO foresaw more business through “an increase in GPS tracking.”
“All of these efforts are aimed at placing our company in the best competitive position possible to pursue what we continue to believe are unprecedented growth opportunities,” added Zoley.
Even as it’s valued at $4 billion, GEO is paying its detainees just pennies on the dollar to clean their detention facilities, undercutting state minimum wage laws, according to a recent ProPublica expose.
To be sure, GEO Group is not alone in terms of private prison profiteering. CoreCivic, the second-biggest private prison corporation, is an enormous ICE contractor, reporting $538.2 million in second-quarter revenue, nearly 10% more than last year.
“Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger recently.
Amazon: Propping Up ICE’s Cloud Services
Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos is worth around a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars. He owns a half-billion dollar yacht and just threw himself a $50 million dollar wedding.
Amazon might be most well known as a shopping and streaming platform, but what’s also propping up Bezos’s lavish lifestyle is Amazon’s cloud storage business, housed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) arm, which rakes in tens of billions of dollars annually. AWS provides critical services for ICE, meaning deportation machine-tied dollars are padding the wealth of top Amazon shareholders like Bezos.
According to a 2018 report put out by several immigrant rights groups, Amazon provides a range of data storage services for ICE through AWS. The report noted that Amazon is a key hosting provider for DHS, including for Palantir’s Integrated Case Management system with ICE. The report called Amazon “the ultimate keeper of the data that enables detentions and deportations,” while MIT Technology Review called Amazon the “invisible backbone” of ICE’s crackdown on immigrants.
The report also noted that Amazon’s extensive business storing government data puts it atop the “Cloud Industrial Complex” that undergirds ICE’s data management systems that are the backbone of deportation machinery. It’s AWS that allows ICE to gather and store massive amounts of information on immigrants, including biometric data and other personal data, and also different databases, from the local to federal levels, to track and deport immigrants.
ICE and DHS continue to rely on Amazon Web Services, as seen in numerous federal contracts with third parties. Many of these contracts also name cloud services of other Big Tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google. Amazon’s AWS blog has boasted how Customs and Border Protection is “using cloud computing, generative AI and machine learning to secure US borders.”
As Bezos’s Amazon continues to build its presence in our neighborhoods and monopoly over our consumer choices, the company is also upholding the system of data and tech that is driving the heartbreaking raids and deportations we’re seeing everyday, forever changing our neighborhoods and the fabric of our communities.
Bank of America: Financing the Deportation Machinery
The corporations doing the on the ground work of deportation depend on financing and credit from Wall Street to carry out their operations. Though big banks have at times and in the face of controversy been pressured to limit their business with industries like private prisons, they’re increasingly willing to expand their business with ICE’s corporate partners in the current political climate.
Take, for example, Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. While Bank of America was one of the banks that curtailed its business with private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic in 2019, it’s now made clear that it’s open for business with clients whose core operations center on tracking, detaining and deporting immigrants.
The news outlet Semaphor reports that CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger recently received a friendly phone call informing him that “[u]pon reconsideration, Bank of America would be happy to offer his company, the second-largest operator of US prisons and detention centers, a bank account.” The report continued that CoreCivic “took Bank of America up on its offer, which had been in the works for months.” Hininger promoted the Semaphor article on his X account, where he also praises ICE.
Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan raked in over $87 million in total compensation in just the past three years. He is the Chancellor of Brown University and a member of the advisory council for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The second-biggest shareholder of Bank of America is Warren Buffet, worth around $145 billion, making him one of the world’s richest persons.
Bank of America may be the most visible consumer-face bank in the U.S, but what millions of its customers might not realize is that their bank is also providing critical financial services for key nodes of ICE deportation machine.
Bank of America is not alone. For example, Citizen’s Bank — among the top 20 U.S. banks, based in Providence, Rhode Island-based — is the lead agent credit agreements for GEO Group and an underwriter for CoreCivic — something which has caught the attention of some activists.
Avelo Airlines: ICE’s Deportation Carrier
When ICE relies on airlines to transport people it detains and deports, some companies are only too happy to profit from this arrangement. One of these corporations is Avelo Airlines, a small airline which has been operating around 10% of ICE’s deportation flights and 20% of its overall flights since May.
Headquartered in Houston, Avelo has a few dozen destination stops as well as hubs in Los Angeles/Burbank, California; Lakeland, Florida; Wilmington, Charlotte/Concord, and Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina; Philadelphia/Wilmington, Delaware; and New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut.
According to the Washington Post, Avelo is subcontracting through another ICE contractor, CSI Aviation, which has a contract with a “potential value of more than $151 million to be performed in Mesa, Arizona, the strategic center of ICE Air Operations.”
Avelo has snagged millions in local subsidies for its airline business, including from states that oppose the increase in ICE presence and deportations. Avelo has faced nationwide protests from Florida to Connecticut for its role within ICE’s deportation machine. Because it’s a commercial passenger airline that doesn’t wholly depend on its business with ICE, it could be more susceptible to activist pressure.
Avelo’s top investor is Morgan Stanley, one of the largest U.S. financial institutions. Other investors include Jaws Estates Capital, the family office of private equity billionaire Barry S. Sternlicht, who founded Starwood Capital Group and serves on the board of the Estée Lauder Companies; Blue Investment Group, a Miami-based private investment firm run by Sanjan ‘Sunny’ Dhody, who, according to one filing, “advises some of the wealthiest families in the United States, Europe, and Latin America” and has “served on the New York Committee of Human Rights Watch”; and Mauloa (formerly Sachs Capital).
Avelo’s founder and CEO, Andrew Levy, is a board director of Latin American airline Copa Airlines and aerospace parts supplier AerSale. Avelo has also partnered with numerous university athletic programs, including at the University of Connecticut, Yale University, University of New Haven, Colorado State University Quinnipiac University, and East Carolina University, and it also has a partnership with Capital One.
Avelo’s not alone in providing air transport for ICE. Other companies like GlobalX and Omni Air International — also backed by private equity — are also cashing in.
Telecoms, Defense Companies, Delivery Services, and More
Additionally, as Fortune Magazine points out, there are a slew of other well known corporations across multiple sectors doing business with ICE right now.
Major Telecoms and Tech Corporations
- AT&T has a multi-year, $83 million contract with ICE to provide IT network products and services that could stretch all the way until 2032 and extend to $164.5 million.
- Motorola Solutions has a $15.6 million contract with ICE to “implement and maintain” ICE “tactical communication infrastructure.” The contract could extend until 2028 and go up to $28 million.
- Dell snagged a $18.8 million contract “to support the office of ICE’s chief information officer through the purchase of Microsoft enterprise software licenses.”
- Comcast received a $60,965 contract to provide broadcast cable at “five regional wire rooms.”
- Charter Communications provides cable and internet services to an ICE office in Beaumont, Texas through a $12,837 contract.
Defense and Weapons Corporations
- Booz Allen Hamilton has a $51.9 million contract to support ICE’s Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) data repository.
- General Dynamics is receiving $9.6 million “to provide background investigations for ICE.”
- L3Harris Technologies has a $4.4 million contract with ICE to provide “equipment to determine the location of targeted mobile handsets to investigate crimes and threats.”
Delivery Service Corporations
- FedEx was awarded a $1 million ICE contract in 2021, set to expire in 2026, for delivery services.
- United Parcel Service (UPS) has a $60,500, that could go up to $90,500, contact with ICE for small package deliveries.
Follow the Oligarchs and Corporations behind ICE
The same oligarchs, billionaires and executives who bust unions and promote austerity are profiting from ICE’s deportation machine. It’s critical and strategic to understand how our movements converge around the profiteering of these powerful super-elites.
Many of them depend on maintaining rosy corporate brands, especially if their products and services are consumer-facing. This means we can generate pressure on them, potentially spooking their investors and denting their profit outlook, by exposing their toxic associations and driving a wedge between them and the public.
A case in point: in part because of public outrage at Elon Musk’s leadership of DOGE and mobilizations like #TeslaTakeDown, Tesla profits plummeted early this year, creating a crisis for Tesla and Musk.
Moreover, for many of these corporations, their business with ICE is not their core business, meaning they could survive if they decided to ditch their ICE contracts and stop providing their critical services to ICE.
If you want to research corporations and billionaires that are profiting from ICE contracts, including those who might be in your area, here are some resources:
- “Who’s Profiting From ICE?,” by the investigative news outlet Sludge, has a map with extensive information on ICE contractors
- “Who’s Profiting from ICE?” is a map with information on ICE contractors broken down into different categories, often with links to information on the actual contacts at USAspending.gov.
A Big Beautiful Win for These Five Billionaire Blocs
Derek Seidman is a writer/reporter for LittleSis, Public Accountability Initiative.
This article was published on September 3, 2025 at LittleSis, Public Accountability Initiative.