Outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, protesters demanding the shutdown of the immigration jail have been met with tear gas and pepper spray. Inside, during the late-June 2026 heat wave, temperatures hit 102 degrees while at least one unit had no air conditioning. People held there have reported rotten food and medical neglect.
The GEO Group, the private prison corporation that runs Delaney Hall, holds a $1 billion contract to provide 1,000 beds there over 15 years. That works out to about $180 per bed, per day — collected whether or not the air conditioning runs or the food is fit to eat.
In the last five days of June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized more than 10,000 people across the country to fill cages like these.
Internal documents obtained by the New York Times, reported July 1, show the White House ordered the surge. ICE leadership made 2,000 arrests a day the new standard, assigned 80% of officers to arrest operations, and pushed as many agents as possible onto seven-day workweeks.
Arrests peaked June 27, when more than 2,400 people were taken in a single day. By June 30, the population in ICE jails had jumped by nearly 4,000 in under a week, to more than 63,000.
Who was taken? Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun and nurse, arrested June 28 on her way to church in McAllen, Texas. Arturo, a 48-year-old Mexican worker who built furniture six days a week, arrested June 28 in Salt Lake City on his way to a soccer game. A Nicaraguan father of two in Miami, arrested June 29 when he showed up for the check-in the government itself had scheduled — his court date wasn’t until 2027. These are the people swept up to meet a quota.
ICE is raiding the working class at government check-ins, traffic stops and morning commutes. Then it calls the haul ‘remarkable operational results,’ in the words of a congratulatory email from deportation chief Marcos Charles.
The White House set the arrest quota. Wall Street set the demand.
On Feb. 12, the bosses of the two largest private prison corporations, GEO Group and CoreCivic, got on the phone with their big investors to report profits — a ritual every corporation performs four times a year. The investors wanted more. ICE wasn’t jailing people fast enough, they complained. “I think people thought we’d be at that 100,000 level,” one said of the detention population, then around 70,000. Four and a half months later, the state delivered.
The prison companies had plenty to brag about. GEO Group made a record $254 million profit in 2025 — about eight times what it made the year before — and signed roughly $520 million in new or expanded government contracts, the most new business in the company’s history by its own account. About half of GEO’s income now comes from ICE.
The company holds roughly one out of every three people in ICE detention, running 93 jails across the U.S. with nearly 70,000 beds. Its subsidiary BI Incorporated holds ICE’s contract for ankle monitors and electronic tracking — GEO gets paid whether an immigrant is inside the cage or out. CoreCivic made a $116.5 million profit in 2025, up nearly 70%, and its income from ICE more than doubled in the last three months of the year.
The money follows each body. ICE pays its contractors a daily rate for every person held — an average of about $187 per detainee per day, by the government’s own accounting. Every arrest in the June surge is a new daily payment to a prison company. The contracts guarantee minimum payments even when beds sit empty, so the corporations collect either way — and every body above the guaranteed floor is added profit. Once inside, the detained people are forced to run the jails themselves. Detained immigrants cook the meals, wash the laundry and scrub the floors for $1 a day under a “Voluntary Work Program” written into the ICE contracts. At Delaney Hall, where pay runs $1 to $4 a day, detained people answered in June the way workers answer: they organized a labor strike. GEO’s response was to lobby ICE to rewrite federal detention standards to declare that the people who run its jails are not employees. In June, ICE published new standards saying exactly that.
The man running ICE is a GEO Group man.
David Venturella took command of ICE on June 1. He is an ICE veteran who left the agency in 2012 for GEO, spent 12 years as an executive selling the company’s detention contracts, and took more than $6 million more as a consultant. In February 2025, he returned to ICE — to run the division that awards detention contracts. GEO’s salesman became GEO’s buyer.
Tom Homan, the White House “border czar” who pushed Venturella’s appointment, was also on GEO’s payroll as a paid consultant. A former ICE official told NPR that when GEO executives visit the agency, “it feels like a fraternity reunion.”
Venturella holds the job in an “acting” capacity, so the Senate never voted on him. No ICE director has faced a Senate vote since 2017.
The commodity is detained human beings. The cost is paid in their bodies. A Human Rights Watch report released June 25 counted 52 deaths in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the administration — a mortality rate more than double what it was when Trump took office, nearly four times the rate under Biden, and higher than during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the current fiscal year, deaths have come at roughly one every six to seven days.
The 29 deaths recorded by mid-April in the current fiscal year had already broken the record of 28 set in 2004. Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian man held at a CoreCivic facility in Florence, Arizona, sought treatment for a tooth infection for a week. He was given ibuprofen. The infection became septic shock, and on March 2 he died. While the toll climbed, ICE shut down the office legally tasked with investigating abuse in detention.
The surge has already overflowed the cages. In South Florida, the Miramar ICE check-in center has been converted into a makeshift jail, with people locked in office rooms for days and forced to sleep on the floor. The administration’s answer is more capacity: a plan to buy warehouses to hold 96,000 detained people. Zoley told investors that warehouse conversion is harder than it looks — and that GEO has 6,000 idle beds ready if the plan falters. Either way the company collects. Congress has locked in the money, first with $170 billion for anti-immigrant enforcement and then with enforcement funding guaranteed through 2029. ICE is now the highest-funded police agency in the country.
This is the police-prison-industrial complex, building concentration camps for immigrants. Imperialist war, blockades and plunder abroad uproot masses of people and drive them across borders. Then the same government that helps uproot millions guarantees contracts for monopoly capital at home — and feeds the displaced into cages as raw material.
Every arrest at a government check-in, during a traffic stop or on the way to work sends a message: keep quiet, skip the union meeting, let the boss steal your wages. Attorney Ysabel Lonazco in Utah says her clients are now afraid to drive to the grocery store.
That is the purpose. Terror in immigrant communities is meant to keep the whole working class quiet, fearful and easier to exploit.
The surge was kept quiet because public raids had already brought resistance. The announced offensives of 2025 and early 2026 — Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Minneapolis operation in which agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti — met protests, legal defeats and public outrage.
They helped force out DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin then promised a “less public-facing” campaign. The reason was clear: when workers saw the raids, they came into the streets.
The movement outside Delaney Hall, in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles and beyond forced the machine into stealth once. A machine that has to hide from the working class can be stopped.
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