ICE Dollars

Follow the money! That's how to find motivation for everything in today's world. 

So today we trace how a 90 percent bed mandate and per diem payments turn detention into a guaranteed cash business, then map the loop from public money to profit to lobbying and back again. Along the way we expose hiring failures, subcontracting fog, and why humane alternatives get sidelined.

• 90 percent minimum bed guarantee as the engine of detention profits
• $130 per diem creating incentives to cut food, medical, and staffing costs
• Publicly traded status driving expansion and investor-friendly margins
• Lobbying reinforcing stricter enforcement and resistance to alternatives
• Subcontracting layers diffusing accountability for harmful practices
• Policy enforcement clashing with constitutional protections in homes
• Political targets and data power shaping where raids intensify
• Rebranding and EO 14006 shifting optics while ICE contracts persist

If you enjoyed this, consider going in the comments or the description and click the buy me a coffee link, and you can send me a couple of bucks and get me a latte

Chapters

• 0:35 Season Five And Sustainable Pace
• 2:12 Two Killings And Public Outrage
• 3:07 Following The Money Behind ICE
• 3:55 The 90 Percent Bed Guarantee
• 6:48 The Daily Rate And Cost Cutting
• 12:07 Profits, Investors, And Lobbying
• 15:25 Why Humane Alternatives Get Blocked
• 18:16 Hiring Lapses And Manufactured Memos
• 22:06 Subcontracting And Diffused Accountability
• 24:16 Policy Over Law And Police Handbooks
• 27:45 Minneapolis, Power, And Voter Data
• 31:11 Rebranding Prisons And EO 14006

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, Owl Medicine, and welcome to season five. I can't believe it's season five. That's wild. Um, I've taken quite a bit of a break. It's been a couple of months since I've put out any podcasts because I kind of I was doing it really, really constantly and I forgot to take time off as I typically do. It's been years now. I have really enjoyed this process, and I am super happy that I took a couple of weeks in uh the well, the first couple of weeks of January to really figure out what I'm doing this year and set myself up for a truly sustainable pace and setting myself up to really make sure that every facet of who I am is and what I need, every facet of who I am and what I need in order to be healthy, happy, and fulfilled is accounted for and well taken care of. So I'm happy to say that I've done that. I've m limited my patient care during the week. I now have scheduled uh errands days and scheduled admin days instead of just working all the time and trying to squeeze scheduling and admin in between, which I don't really mind all that much, but I am having fun with this kind of experiment of what I can do with my own uh schedule this year. So this is a really wild episode. Um, now that the house cleaning is mostly over. This wow, y'all. 2026 is starting off with a bang. Um, two bangs, uh, two very loud, important bangs. Our lovely friend who is an Icy U nurse and Renee Good, both of these people have been shot and killed by police this year. 32 people were, or not by police, by ice, uh, 32 people were killed by ice last year, but nobody really heard about it because they were brown. Um, so now that people, that white people are being shot, people are extremely upset about it. And they ought to be. We all ought to be really, really upset about it. But I came across this video that started talking about the money behind ice, and they said in it something about Core Civic and Geo Group housing 75% of all the ice detainees, and I was like, oh what? That's a crazy high number. So I decided to look into it and see what I could find, and oh boy, is it interesting. So today we are going to do a deep dive um into a bit of ICE's money and how they make money, what their structure is on the inside, how they get their contracts, rather, who they have their contracts with. So to start this off, let's look at some numbers. We're gonna look at three numbers. Um 90%,$130, and$11.8 million. So the 90% is the guaranteed occupancy quota in a private detention contract.$130 is the daily rate per person that taxpayers pay to one detainee. Not to the detainee, but to house one detainee.$11.8 million is the total daily taxpayer cash flow to just those two corporations that run this system. This is the business model of private detention centers. It's a guaranteed revenue stream. And we, the taxpayers, are the guaranteer, which is so screwed. So let's follow the money. Let's start with that first number: 90%. This is the standard contract clause. 90%. It's called the minimum bed guarantee or a take or pay clause. Here's how it works: a corporation like GEO Group or Core Civic builds or operates a thousand-person detention center for ICE. In that contract, ICE agrees to pay a minimum of 90% of those 1,000 beds every single day. That's 900 beds paid for, whether they have someone in them or not. So think about what that means. If the detainee population drops, if fewer people are crossing the border, if more cases are processed, if a court orders releases, I still have to pay for 900 empty beds. The financial risk is removed from the corporation and transferred directly to us, the taxpayers. The industry calls this risk mitigation. Yeah. But activists, people like us and regular ass folks call it a bed mandate or a quota, because that's literally what it is. It's literally a quota. They're having to meet a quota of people in the detention centers or they have to pay money. That 90% clause, they call it a take-or-pay clause, that means that we are paying for those beds to be 90% full, whether they are full or not. Whether they're full or not, we are guaranteeing that we are paying these detention centers 90% of their maximum occupancy every day, no matter what, whether there are people in those beds or not. So the industry calls that risk mitigation. It's obviously deeply, deeply screwed. And this is part of the foundational scam of the whole thing. Everything else, the profits, the lobbying, the perverse incentives flows from this like one cause. The 90% guarantee is the engine of this entire money-making like formula. So the second number,$130, that's the per diem, the daily rate per detainee. So that$900 or that$900 people that they're guaranteed to be paid for, they're getting paid$130 per detainee or per bed, whether there's a detainee in it or not. And it's not a fixed number. It varies by facility and by security level, it bear it varies by contract, but it's typically anywhere between like$60 and$200. So we'll use the$130, that's the average as like the anchor. Where does that money go? Well, this is given to uh like Core Civic and Geo Group, which by the way, Core Civic used to be called the Corrections Corporation of America, the CCA, the like super evil federal government, like uh like crap that was going on with the federal like life detainees. That's this they rebranded. They were like, oh yeah, everybody hates us now. Corrections officers and corrections corporations in America, the most imprisoned population in the world. Yeah, we need to rebrand. And they did, and they rebranded as core civic, and now they run ICE D they run ICE detainee um encampments and prisons. How lovely is that? So what happens with that money? It's a lump sum that's given to the government 90 or 900 beds in a 1,000 bed facility,$130 per person. Um, and what that's what that does is it's supposed to cover housing, security, food, medical care, staff salaries, and whatever the corporation's profit is supposed to be. But here is the brutal incentive of the whole things. The corporation's profit is what is left over after costs. Uh let me repeat that. Their profit is the gap between that$130 daily rate and whatever they actually spend on the human being in the cell. This creates a direct financial pressure to cut costs on the people inside, on food quality, on medical staffing, on rehabilitation programs, on guards, on clothes. Every dollar not spent on care is a dollar for profit. And that's important because both of these companies are publicly traded. That's right. You can go right now on the New York Stock Exchange and you can invest in either Geo Group or Core Civic, or if you're truly a heartless demon, both. And this is this matter, we'll get into that is at at toward the end. I'll talk about how this fit fits into the stock exchange and that money incentive. It's gross. So that$130 isn't just a price tag, it's the gap between that that like that pay that they get and whatever they spend is how they make their money. And the bigger that gap is, the more money that they can get from investors. But before we even get to the investors, because investors are looking for whatever whatever company is doing the best in its market, and then they'll invest in that, expecting a larger return on their investment later. And right now they're investing hard because neither because Geo Group they stopped except they stopped doing payouts um in 2021, apparently. Um, so they are really ex they're taking all of this investment that they're getting, which is billions of dollars, and they're investing it in paying off debts, the debts that they'd accrued, building these facilities and expanding facilities and trying to obtain new contracts, because that is how you increase the profit margin. So let's talk about that last number: the 11.8 million dollars. This is the big number. It's not, it's just a day. If you multiply this out, it gets close to$30 billion a year. But the$11 million, almost$12 million a day. This is the picture on the national level of what our money is doing. It's$11.8 million a day. Um, that is for Geo Group and Core Civic together. The two giants have combined annual revenue from all government contracts of four billion dollars in just federal and just federal contracts. Um it's insane. So the massive chunk of that is ICE detention. A conservative estimate puts the ICE specific portion at 2.5 to 4 million per day just for immigration to uh detention. So what's their take? Their net profit margin is about six percent according to them. So from that almost 12 million dollars a day, their combined daily profit is about$700,000. That's over a quarter billion dollars a year in net profit. A quarter billion dollars a year in net profit for for kidnapping and illegally detaining peaceful working people. And this money doesn't just sit in a vault, it activates that final piece of the machine, this feedback loop and the stock exchange. The river of guaranteed public money that funds the massive lobbying operations. Millions of dollars every year are sent to politicians on both sides of the aisle to make sure that this continues to happen. They lobby for stricter immigration enforcement, they lobby against alternatives to detention, they lobby for policies that will ensure a steady supply of detainees to fill their guaranteed beds. So let's follow this loop really plainly. Taxpayer dollars fund the guaranteed contracts. The contracts generate guaranteed corporate funds. Profits fund lobbying and political contributions. Lobbying shapes the law that then mandates more detention, and then more detention requires more guaranteed contracts. And that's without including the fact that they're publicly traded. They have already a closed system loop. This is how business runs in America right now, and this is not just Core Civic or Geogroup or ICE. This is literally 100% of these megacorps. This is how they run. You create a problem, you create a solution, and you make money on both ends. This is exactly what they're doing. America is a giant corporation, and this is what we're doing with it. It's really freaking disgusting. So let's tie these three numbers together into one plain, ugly fucking truth. Because the 90% guarantee, any attempt at humane reform becomes an act that like you can't do because it's budget sabotage. So you can't actually treat any of these people remotely decently because of that 90%. Imagine a cheaper, more humane alternative to detention like an ankle monitor or a uh community case management. It might cost$20 a day instead of$130 a day. A rational system would switch to that and save money. But they're not, because this is a closed loop, irrational system. Built in this system, if ICE uses that alternative, they still have to pay for the empty bed under the 90% guarantee. So now the agency's choice is pay for the humane option and the empty cage or just pay for the empty cage. Do you get that? Their choice is pay for the humane option, like the ankle monitor and an empty cage, or just pay for the empty cage. Like these contracts, that 90%, if they're not full, ICE has to pay. ICE is the federal government, right? And they do contracts with civilian contracting companies like Geo Group and Core Civic. And they have this 90% clause built in. And what that means is that Core Civic and Geogroup will be paid that 90% up capacity, whether or not those beds are full. So even if the beds aren't full, the federal government is still paying these corporations for their empty beds. So it behooves the corporations to be building as many detention centers as they possibly can, so they can have as many beds as they possibly can, so they can try to fill the detention centers as fast as they can. And because every empty bed that they have is a little bit more profit, and that allows them to use that profit as investment in paying down old debts to make their and to make their public investors more likely to invest in them over their competitors. In this system, if ICE uses that alternative, they still have to pay for the empty bed under that 90% guarantee. And by ICE, I mean the federal government is ICE. They're paying a civilian contracting group for that 90% guarantee. So the agency's choice is again pay for the humane option and the empty cage, or just pay for the cage. The cheaper and kinder option becomes more expensive, and that matters because the agency, the agency, because it's publicly traded, has short-term, has a short-term budget sheet. That's all they care about is that short-term quarterly profit. That's all that matters because they're publicly traded. So we have this inertia, this financial like guaranteed crisis, this circular way to create, to make criminals, um, and detain them and make a bunch of money on the back of them. It's super fucked up. And there is a follow-up I'm gonna be doing to this about the journalist Laura Jade. And this is interesting because uh there have been a couple of instances of people being hired by ICE, including um Laura Jade, who is a pretty unique name and it's pretty Googlable, and they didn't bother Googling her. And um, there was another one from a couple of years ago, and like she was hired without ever doing anything besides the initial application. She never filled out the domestic abuse report, she never filled out any of their secondary stuff or signed the contract. She was a month after she applied, she was sent to uh she was sent an email about getting a drug test for the company. She did the drug test and then didn't do anything else, and then decided to follow up like a month after that and was like, huh, I wonder. And she went on the little account thing and found out that she had apparently passed the drug test, um, and she had also been hired officially by ICE, and her background check was um uh was going to be cleared three days in the future. But that was quite interesting. There is uh that's that's it's like wow, that's that's how well they're doing their hiring, their hiring processes. But this doesn't this doesn't deviate from today's episode. It actually gets really interesting because there was another lady who was hired and got in, decided to do this kind of under the cover, undercover work, essentially. And she went in and her job was to write memos. She was hired as a um like a legal assistant with zero actual training, and then um was then i internally her to job title was known as case manager, and that's interesting in and of itself, but she never got any training, she had no legal uh training whatsoever, and her job was to write these memos, and they were to write these memo affidavit things that were all likely instances that people would commit crimes, like literally write up a scenario that is likely of a crime happening, and then they her job was to submit those um memos to ICE and ICE would use those memos in the court hearings where people would be detained, arrested, detained, and then put up for court to be um put in court to hopefully get out. ICE would grab one of these memos written by literally just a rando off of LinkedIn with no legal training whatsoever. They would use these memos as evidence against all of the immigrants that were supposed to be in court. They would go to court, they would like, oh, well, we have this evidence, it's this memo, and this person fits this, um, fits this scenario. So we're going to investigate further and keep them in the bed. That's what they do. And here is an example of a person who got hired, no oversight, and literally her job was to manufacture evidence against immigrants, against brown people, not even immigrants, just brown people that people are as that people assume are immigrants. Like th these are not two separate things. These are the exact same, these are the exact same um functions happening, and look, we're looking at it from slightly different angles. What we discussed today is the act is the internal framework, and that instance is not a it is not a like an outlier. That is a perfect example of what happens when you have this 90% mandate in the these contracts to where you like your ICE pays ICE pays Geo Group for uh 900 bodies in a bed, like no matter what, whether there's two people there or whether there's a thousand people there, ICE pays for 90. If they go above that, they pay for that as well, but they pay minimum ninety. And these groups, it was Geo Group that hired that lady who was writing the memorandums. It was Geo Group who hired her because ICE signs contracts with people like Geogroup, and then Geo Group, they're called pass-through companies. They will sign the umbrella contract and then they will do like subletting, essentially subcontracting, and they'll subcontract out a bunch of individual parts of that. And by doing that, they're doing their risk mitigation, they're just shoving things further and further down, and you can't easily point your finger at one thing that went wrong, and that allows them to just do whatever they want. This is an important piece because just the other day, CNN put out a thing about there was a memorandum that was circulated through ICE where they said that you don't need a judicial warrant to go into people's houses anymore. And that's obviously unconstitutional. Like the Supreme Court has specific language that they have used repeatedly about how the um like forcible entry into a home is the precise and greatest evil that the wording of the Fourth Amendment is aimed at. They specifically don't want people doing that, but like we literally added to the Constitution to make sure that this didn't happen. Um, and so it's not legal, and so it doesn't matter that's a memorandum, except it does matter that it's a memorandum because this all falls into policing, all of this enforcement stuff all falls into policing, and policing is not a linear thing. Policing sits at the intersection of a lot of bunch, of a lot of bunch of stuff of laws, of judicial and of judicial stuff, of executive stuff, of local policies and department policies, and they sit in the middle and try to enforce all of that, and they have complete immunity to do that or to do whatever they want while they're doing it. But the thing is, is they don't enforce laws, they enforce policies. Their job is to enforce police policy, and the policies are supposed to follow the law, but they don't. You might not know this, but 60% of all of the police forces in the United States get all of their hand their police handbooks and their and their um policy books from the same company that all they do is write policies that get police out of uh being held accountable. That's their whole fucking job. 60% why are all of these police operating from the same handbook? Because they literally are operating from the same handbook. It's insane. The way that we treat people for profit is absolutely disgusting. I really wanted to make this clear what happens with ICE, because I've seen people that used to be friends of mine talking about, well, it's all because of illegal war, if we weren't bombing people in other countries and they weren't coming to our country. And I'm like, no, bro, that's not it. If that's it, if that were it, we would have instead of Minneapolis, where there's like a couple hundred thousand um immigrants, there would be like we would have this ice breakdown happening in Texas or Nevada or Southern California. And they moved out of those places because it just didn't work. But they're not, they're not doing it in Texas where all the immigrants actually are. They're doing it in Minneapolis. And why are they doing it in Minneapolis? They're doing it in Minneapolis because Minneapolis refused to give the Trump administration their voter roles. They want the voter roles because when the elections come out, they want to be able to declare fraud. And in order to do that, they need to have a paper trail. And so they are they basically strong armed the rest of the country into giving them their voter stuff. And Minnesota's one of those kind of swingy states. So they are really pushing hard in Minnesota because they want all of the voter data registration information and who voted what in the entire state, so they can rig elections. That's why this is happening in in Minneapolis and not places where there actually are high concentrations of immigrants. If this were about immigration, that's where the immigration enforcement would be, are places where it's immigrants, but it's not. It's about distracting from the Epstein Files because Donald Trump is the single most um listed name in the entirety of the Epstein Files. His name enlisted hundreds of times more than anybody else. There was a guy who resigned from Harvard or one of those Ivy League schools because he was listed like six times, and he like resigned, he like resigned in shame, and Donald Trump is like the number one listed motherfucker, and he's still the president. So effing gross. So here we are. Here we are. It's not about immigration, it's about making money for all of his buddies and the four the for-profit prison companies in the United States have not changed. The uh the correctional corporation of America, Corrections Corporation of America, the CCA, is now core civic. And a lot of this happened because Biden signed a bill at the toward the end of his stuff that made it to where they uh were they eliminated a lot of long-term federal prisons. The thing that he signed was Executive Order 1406. And he signed it in January of 21, and it applied to every federal detention center except for ICE. The language explicitly covered the Department of Justice and criminal detention contracts, and it did not extend to immigration and customs enforcement detention facilities, um, which all which lie under the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, private prisons use ICE detention continued under existing and new contracts. So when Biden got rid of the contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshall Services, they were like, we're going to do a broad reduction in private prison use and the criminal justice system. They're like, we're gonna cut down on private prison use. And they did by name only. This is what I mean about right wing and left being left wing being from the same bird. I mentioned in the podcast episode that these people are donating to both sides of the aisle. This is how the Democrats pretend to do nice things because they're really good at manipulating like titles and shuffling things around. Both sides are. And it sounded like a really great idea to get rid of uh like the all the the uses of these for-profit prisons, but they wound up just shuffling them over to ICE to make sure somebody's buddy made a little extra money. All right. Thank you for joining me. I hope you'll join me for the next episode where we talk about ICE's just complete and like ridiculousness and noting not even being able to hire qualified people, but who who's surprised? If you made it this far, thank you for spending your time with me. Welcome to season five of the Speak Plainly Podcast. I am looking forward to doing many more of these this year. I have a long, long list of outlines and ideas that I've been collecting over the last couple of months that I haven't been doing podcasts. So I'm excited for this year, and I hope that you are too. If you enjoyed this, consider going in the comments or the uh the description and click the buy me a coffee link, and you can send me a couple of bucks and get me a latte. Thank you so much for your time, and remember, fuck ice. But also, stay curious and stay uncomfortable.