It was a grim harbinger of things to come when higher-ups at the controversial private prison firm Geo Group boasted to investors last year about “unprecedented opportunities” that would arise from President Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
And that excitement makes even more sense now that two of the top officials tasked with leading the president’s broadly unpopular mass incarceration and deportation agenda are people who have worked for Geo Group in the not-so-distant past.
The Trump administration said Tuesday that David Venturella, a former official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who worked as a senior executive at Geo Group before rejoining ICE last year, will serve as ICE’s new acting director. He will take over for the previous acting director, Todd Lyons, who reportedly struggled to meet demands from Trump officials — including Stephen Miller — that he ramp up deportations.
Venturella will work in tandem with Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, who reportedly made at least $5,000 as a consultant for Geo Group in recent years before joining Trump’s administration. Homan has also faced bribery accusations that he accepted $50,000 in an FBI sting operation after indicating he could help secure government contracts in Trump’s second term. (Homan has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing.)
Homan has vowed to ramp up deportations, which could help line the pockets of Geo Group and other prison companies even more than the government already has over the past year.
“This year will be a good year,” Homan said last week at the Border Security Expo in Arizona. “Mass deportations are coming.”
A good year for democracy? No.
A good year for companies looking to cash in by helping the Trump regime warehouse human beings? Perhaps.
As acting ICE director, Venturella takes the helm at an agency that has become synonymous with racist terror. The Department of Homeland Security has become a vector for white supremacist propaganda, and ICE agents in particular — often masked and now empowered by conservative Supreme Court justices to use racial profiling — have garnered comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan.
The fact that a former executive at a private prison company is now leading ICE raises fresh questions about Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown and whether profiteering — perhaps, just as much as sheer bigotry — is the driving force behind it.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.