As the Trump administration bulks up its mass deportation machine, officials have relied on a network of for-profit prison companies that run the overwhelming majority of America’s immigration detention centers.
One of the officials overseeing those contracts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the government’s Department of Homeland Security, is a former executive from a top private prison firm, GEO Group, which manages 20 detention centers across the country.
According to The Washington Post, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan approached David Venturella for a role in the administration, despite federal ethics rules that largely prohibit government employees from working on contracts with their former employers.
Instead, Venturella was hired by the Department of Homeland Security as a full-time adviser and was granted a waiver from those ethics rules, according to the newspaper. Doing so has kept him out of the public eye and away from potentially contentious Senate confirmation hearings, the newspaper noted.
Venturella worked as an assistant director at ICE before he was recruited by GEO Group in 2012. He left the company in 2023 though he stayed on as a paid consultant through January 31, according to company filings reviewed by The Washington Post.
This apparent revolving door has also swung in the other direction.
Days before the 2024 election, a top official at ICE left his position to take a senior role at GEO. Daniel Bible, who worked for ICE for nearly 15 years, is now a senior vice president at the company.
At least six former ICE officials who left government work over the past decade now work in top roles at the company, according to reporting from nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. The group found a “long tradition of ICE officials departing to work for the agency’s top contractor,” part of the so-called “revolving door” between the federal government and the private sector.
The Independent has requested comment from ICE and GEO.
In a statement to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for ICE said Venturella has divested his GEO stocks and holdings and “has no financial ties to the company.”
The spokesperson said he “has no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts,” but declined to comment on why he was given a waiver that authorizes him to work on Geo matters, according to the newspaper.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the newspaper that Homan adheres to “the highest ethical standards and he had no knowledge of any potential conflicts” involving Venturella.
GEO runs 100 facilities globally, with a capacity of approximately 81,000 beds across those facilities, according to documents obtained by the ACLU.
More than 22,000 beds – more than a quarter of GEO’s global capacity – are inside ICE detention centers in the United States, including California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.
Nearly 90 percent of all immigration detention systems are operated by private prison contractors. More than 56,000 people are currently in ICE detention — likely a record in modern history. The figures top both the 39,000 people held in the final days of Joe Biden’s administration, and the previous recent record of 55,654 in August 2019 during the first Trump administration.
Since January, ICE has awarded GEO new and modified contracts expected to increase the agency’s bed space to keep up with the administration’s anti-immigration agenda, which the president and Congress have boosted by tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.
With a directive from the White House to make at least 3,000 daily arrests, ICE received record-breaking funding from Congress — expanding the agency’s budget to be larger than most countries’ militaries — to hire more officers and expand detention space.
That surge in congressional funding could land private contractors lucrative deals to detain more immigrants.
Earlier this year, GEO inked a 15-year contract with ICE worth $60 million a year, the company announced. According to the Federal Procurement Data System, the contract is worth a total of $1.2 billion.
