How DHS Spending Fuels Detention and ICE Air Profits (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Have you seen these massive warehouses ISIS reportedly trying to buy and then detain people in? Maybe you've also seen that some of those deals are falling apart. Because companies don't want to be associated with or potentially profit from mass deportation. But there are plenty of companies that already have billions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Call it the deportation industrial complex or just regular old government procurement. Either way, they stand to gain from the most money ever put towards deporting migrants with potentially more money to come. But between redacted contracts, private charter flights and layers of subcontractors, it's not easy to figure out where all that money is going. So here's the big ticket ways your tax dollars are being spent on mass deportation and a few of the biggest companies cashing in. I'm going to focus on two areas, detention and transportation. Why? Because other than paying and equipping federal agents, those are the biggest costs. Let's start with detention. DHS is detaining a record number of people. According to DHS's most recent numbers, it costs around $187 to detain one adult for one day. And even though most people detained by DHS haven't been convicted of a crime, many are housed in facilities that were or still are prisons. Most recent estimates find a vast majority of immigration detainees are held in facilities run or owned by private prison companies. The GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two biggest. And guess what? They are public companies. So they're obligated to tell their shareholders at least some information about how they make profits. And they're not exactly shy about how mass deportation boosts their bottom line. Here's CoreCivic's CEO.

[00:01:51] Speaker 2: Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment.

[00:01:55] Speaker 1: And here's the GEO Group's CFO giving a little bit more detail about their profit margins. He's talking about all facilities the GEO Group owns, immigration and otherwise. Like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. It reopened in early 2025 after signing a 15-year, $1 billion contract with DHS.

[00:02:22] Speaker 3: It's an exceptionally long contract. They really typically range from about one to five years. That is very worrisome because this spans technically four presidential administrations.

[00:02:34] Speaker 1: What's the problem with a company like CoreCivic or GEO Group being the beneficiary of this policy priority?

[00:02:41] Speaker 3: Transparency and oversight. So when journalists, when advocates do see these contracts, if they FOIA them, a lot of the contract data is actually redacted.

[00:02:55] Speaker 1: Okay, so what's FOIA? It's an acronym for the Freedom of Information Act, a law that allows anyone the right to get records from executive branch agencies. Here's a contract between ICE and the GEO Group the ACLU FOIAed. All terms and pricing amounts are redacted. See? What's the justification for redacting so much?

[00:03:15] Speaker 3: The companies will say that their firms, they have trade secrets.

[00:03:19] Speaker 1: Trade secrets.

[00:03:20] Speaker 3: When they bid for these contracts, it's a competitive bidding process, and they might not want to reveal their staff ratios, how they make a profit.

[00:03:30] Speaker 1: Now, federal agencies don't always have to hold competitive processes. Federal law lets them give out no-bid contracts in special circumstances. But according to government watchdogs, no-bid contracts can be a problem because folks in charge of where the money goes could potentially steer those funds to whomever they want. You know who this guy is, right? Good morning. It's Tom Homan, the border czar. In August 2025, House Democrats sent him a letter pointing out that in his ethics disclosure, he said he was a consultant for the GEO Group from 2023 to 2025. They also claimed that after he joined the second Trump administration, he played a key role in hiring this man, David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive. Now, he manages contracts for immigrant detention centers for DHS. House Democrats wrote they were concerned that Homan is uniquely positioned to help your former business client reap a huge windfall. Now, because Homan works for the White House and Venturella for DHS, we reached out to both about the House Democrats' letter. The White House contested the allegation, writing Homan continues to adhere to the federal ethics and conflicts of interest rules and that he has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. DHS responded that Venturella complied with all ethics requirements. They told us Venturella's former employment at the GEO Group triggered a one-year restriction from doing certain work with the company, but that ICE leadership granted him authorization for some work to meet the critical needs of the agency.

[00:05:01] Speaker 3: There's a revolving door, which is typical with any industry, the defense industry, and you will see people on the board of directors of both companies or in leadership that have served in federal administrations.

[00:05:13] Speaker 1: Okay, so now we're going to talk about transportation, and specifically air travel. DHS calls it ICE air operations, and it's more flights than you might realize. One Venezuelan asylum seeker told CNN he was detained at Delaney Hall in Newark, then flown to a facility in Louisiana, then to Virginia, then to Texas, and then to California, where he is now detained. That's four flights for one detainee. That tracks with larger numbers. Most of the detainees arrested in the first 10 months of 2025 were held in more than one facility, and nearly half were shuffled between three or more. And information about ICE air is even harder to track down than detention facilities, so I decided to go see for myself which companies are profiting from flying detainees around and how. We're at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, and thousands of people come through this airport every day. But also at this airport, there is a private terminal that immigration detainees are loaded onto planes and shipped to various different detention centers across the country. And believe it or not, people on the ground looking at airplanes provide some of the best information out there on how ICE air works.

[00:06:29] Speaker 4: What are you looking at here? So I've got a little flight tracker set up that has a filter on it that's going to show us all of the flights that are working in the domestic shuffle here in the United States.

[00:06:41] Speaker 1: If it weren't for you setting up here, watching these planes, and then sending out alerts, we wouldn't know how many planes are going where, how many people are on each of those planes, and what these sort of deportation shuffle flights are all about.

[00:06:55] Speaker 4: That makes me sound a lot more important than it should, but I don't know who else would be out here doing it if I hadn't gotten the ball rolling on it. And as far as numbers go, DHS and ICE, it's kind of a black box. Once in a while, we'll get an update on however many people they've arrested or whatever, but it comes in fits and spurts. It's not in real time.

[00:07:15] Speaker 1: While DHS and ICE do provide yearly stats on detainment, ICE flights are not publicly disclosed, either in real time or yearly. House and Senate oversight committees who could ask DHS to make those flight stats public haven't used their subpoena power to do so. But data collected by folks like Benson and online flight trackers show the numbers are growing significantly. FAA regulations mandate that airplanes use call signs to identify their aircraft to air traffic control and on publicly accessible real-time maps. But in spring 2025, Nick Benson noticed something was changing.

[00:07:53] Speaker 4: These flights would not be coming through in that FAA data because they're using something called the LADD list, L-A-D-D, and that's the same privacy program that like Taylor Swift and Elon use to prevent eccentrics like us from keeping track of what they're doing. But traditionally, these charter airlines that operate these ICE flights, you know, up until this spring, that was always publicly available information. It's an extra step they took to obfuscate things further.

[00:08:18] Speaker 1: Neither DHS nor the FAA has thus far issued statements confirming these security measures or offering an explanation. In response to our query, a spokesperson wrote, And that's really when I started getting keenly interested in what was going on because if they didn't want us to see what they were doing, why was that, you know? All right, the app says that the plane's at 1,600 feet. It took off from El Paso about a couple hours ago, and it's landing here in St. Paul.

[00:08:55] Speaker 4: All of the ICE deportation flights that have operated out of Minneapolis that I've seen are operated by charter airlines like this one. This one is Eastern Air Express. Global Crossing is another airline that operates a lot of these flights here at Minneapolis.

[00:09:08] Speaker 1: So then how does the charter airline make money?

[00:09:11] Speaker 4: They are billing for their services that are done here. Generally, when you're chartering a flight, you're looking at the origin and destination, and you're going to be getting a bid on how that's going to work based on how many people you expect, how far you're moving them, and things like that. Shortly after Trump takes office, the second time, we start getting two of these a week. This fall, it turned to two or three a week. And last week, we had two or three of these flights a day as the surge was happening.

[00:09:38] Speaker 1: According to ICE's website, the average cost of a daily scheduled charter flight is about $8,500 per flight hour. But it's hard to verify. DHS has a deal with a company called CSI Aviation as its main contractor, and airlines like Eastern Air Express are subcontractors. According to public disclosures, CSI got a one-year deal worth over $500 million. And according to the ICE Flight Data Tracker Project, a consortium of independent flight watchers, a number of other charter airlines also transport detainees. These airlines have all been observed operating for ICE. Though Avelo halted ICE flights, citing a lack of predictable revenue. But the numbers of flights have been growing, year over year and month over month.

[00:10:23] Speaker 4: Do they normally fill the jets up with people? The most I've ever seen get on one of these flights is 127. Wow. The last few days, we've been looking at 30 to 40.

[00:10:33] Speaker 1: 49 people boarded the Eastern Air Express flight we witnessed. It took off and landed in Omaha and then flew to Louisiana. We weren't able to calculate exactly how much taxpayers were charged for this flight and how much profit both Eastern Air and CSI made from it. None of these airlines have responded to our request for comment. But in 2024, GlobalX informed shareholders it was awarded a five-year contract flying ICE charter flights. And in 2025, Key Lime told a Colorado newspaper it couldn't discuss its charter operation. Which leaves us to this last point.

[00:11:06] Speaker 3: It is much harder to find out what is happening with these smaller companies that are not publicly traded.

[00:11:13] Speaker 1: Look at this. It's a house in Virginia, the registered headquarters of Acquisition Logistics, LLC, a government contractor that inked a deal worth up to $1.3 billion over two years for this project, Camp East Montana, a gigantic 5,000-bed tent facility in El Paso, Texas. Acquisition Logistics was founded in 2008 by a Navy veteran and despite reportedly having scant experience running or building detention facilities, won the contract over several other bidders. The experts I talked to all emphasized that the issue of transparency also boils down to a question of the treatment of detainees. We have to remember a majority of these people haven't committed or been convicted of a crime.

[00:11:58] Speaker 5: We're absolutely in a new era. You don't have access maybe to the contract. You don't have access to information on the inside. You don't have oversight and accountability. Maybe they're going above and beyond in providing excellent service that I'm just not privy to. Nobody knows, and that's inherently a problem.

[00:12:16] Speaker 3: We've seen an almost complete dismantling of the oversight that the federal government is doing to ensure that these places of detention are providing basic human rights.

[00:12:34] Speaker 1: Acquisition Logistics did not respond to CNN's request for comment. Now, you've been inside the East Montana soft-sided detention facility. What's it like in there?

[00:12:43] Speaker 5: Everything is swift. It's fast. It's not designed for a longer-term care and a situation of well-being. It's all about the swiftness of a process, and if it happens to be cruel and harsh, well, so be it. Ultimately, deportation is the goal.

[00:12:58] Speaker 1: Americans are growing skeptical of ISIS tactics as they arrest people and confront protesters. But so much of the broader system of deportation, and all the private companies profiting from it, remains hidden.