ICE Profiteers Trying To Buy the Senate for Republicans

Only three months had passed since Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by a federal immigration agent in Maine, and the state’s Republican senator, Susan Collins, had already forgotten his name. Guerrero was driving to work on July 13 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent David Brouillette demanded he stop his car, then shot him to death through the windshield while Guerrero’s wife and 3-year-old daughter watched. Guerrero was 25 years old. His last words were “I tried to stop.” 

“First of all, my heart goes out to the family of the man who was shot in Biddeford, Mr. Duran Guerro,” Collins said in response to a moderator’s question at her debate with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson last week. “And we’ve seen other shootings as well. I believe ICE needs reform.” 

She then described how she enacted “three major reforms” for ICE, including funding for body-worn cameras she claimed “would have to be switched on when there was an enforcement action,” though ICE said in a report the day before that it would not do that. Collins also claimed she increased the budget for the ICE inspector general office by 17 percent, though the budget for that function is the same as it was last year, and increased ICE funding “by millions of dollars so that we could get better training of ICE officials including de-escalation training,” though ICE and Customs and Border Patrol still had $152 billion in their accounts as of July and it’s unclear what purpose additional “millions” for training would serve. 

When it was his turn to speak, Jackson explained why he believed ICE should be abolished. But he corrected her initial mistake first. 

“The man’s name was Johan Sebastián Guerrero. That was his name. He had a family and he had a daughter,” he said. “I don’t know how you can stand up here and argue that it is a good thing to let [ICE] out into our population and to the American people. We have seen consistently that they will murder people if you don’t comply explicitly with them.” 

Collins has an incentive to argue in favor of the agency, just like she has an incentive to forget Guerrero’s name. She is among the several GOP incumbents in tight races drawing thousands of dollars in campaign donations from some of the biggest corporations profiting off Trump’s immigration terror campaign. As the Maine Beacon pointed out last week, major ICE contractors have donated over $130,000 to Collins’ reelection campaign, including executives and board members at CoreCivic, who gave her a total of more than $6,500, and Palantir, which provides surveillance tools for ICE, which gave her $12,500.  

Collins did not respond to questions from the Prospect about her acceptance of these gifts or comment on her conflicted interests, given that she is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins has considerable power over how much the federal government funds ICE; she voted in May for a party-line funding bill that approved $70 billion in funding for the agency with no oversight. 

Collins also did not respond to a request for comment about why she misidentified Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

“Susan Collins gave Donald Trump’s ICE $70 billion with no guardrails, and now the companies helping ICE surveil and detain Americans are powering her re-election campaign,” Maine Democratic Spokesperson Misha Linnehan said in response to the donations. “In the wake of the murder of Johan Sebastián Guerrero, we need a Senator who will protect our state from ICE—not one who is in thrall to the companies making money off of ICE’s abuses.”

Collins is just one of multiple GOP candidates who are receiving campaign donations from the ICE detention center industry, which has emerged as a major spender in this year’s midterms following the last two years of record-breaking profits. Federal Election Commission filings show that several Republican contenders are receiving contributions from detention profiteer executives and their political action committees, including GEO Group, CoreCivic, Management and Training Corporation, and NANA Regional Corporation, all of which rent detention facilities or services to the government. Detention industry contractors that provide other aspects of the terror campaign, such as surveillance companies Anduril Industries, Palantir, and Steampunk, are likewise giving significant donations. 

Read: ICE planning $100 million “nightmare” domestic spy program

GEO Group, the largest provider of detention camps, has so far spent $6 million on Republicans this cycle through its subsidiary GEO Reentry Services. Most of that spending, $4.4 million, has gone to Trump’s MAGA Inc. political action committee (PAC); the rest has gone to other right-wing PACs, including the Congressional and Senate Leadership Fund PACs, the primary Republican super PACs for House and Senate races. 

GEO Group has poured more money into next month’s election via its corporate PAC, donating nearly half a million dollars to Republican nominees, incumbents, and candidates. It gave the maximum $10,000 to Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), a member of the “Combat Mexican Drug Cartels Task Force,” who last month told Trump in a campaign video: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.”

It gave the same to Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security. The next biggest winner of GEO money is Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), who is a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, and is trying to retain her seat against progressive challenger Angie Nixon. The PAC gave her $8,500. It gave $7,500 to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), $5,000 to Collins, and $1,000 to former FBI agent Mike Rogers, who is in a tight race to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate against Abdul El-Sayed. 

CoreCivic is the second-largest private prison company. Its PAC has spent $208,000 on Republican candidates in this cycle, including $10,000 to Garbarino and $5,000 each to Collins and Rogers. 

Executives and officers from both companies are likewise pouring money into Republican races, with a primary focus on saving the Senate for the GOP. Together the group has poured in more than $600,000 on Garbarino, Moody, Salazar, and Rogers, along with far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is facing progressive challenger James Talarico to represent the state in the Senate; Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who wants to be the governor and is refusing to debate Democrat Jerri Green; Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), who is running against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek; and U.S. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who Democrat Sherrod Brown is challenging. 

Some of the donations follow a convoluted line. For example, William Francis Monet, the head of ICE contractor Akima, gives religiously to the PAC of Akima’s parent company, the Alaska Native Corporation NANA Regional Corporation. NANAPAC, in turn, gives donations to Alaska Republicans, but also to Rogers and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, formerly a senator from Oklahoma. 

The millions that ICE contractors are spending to buy the Senate is an attempt to preserve an industry that for the last two years has made record profits off of human suffering. On Saturday, staff at GEO Group’s Rio Grande Processing Center in Laredo, Texas, found 56-year-old father of three, Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, dead in his cell, the seventh person to die in Texas detention this year alone. He had lived in Dallas for decades, was planning to return to his birth country of Mexico, and had been building a house there. According to the Prospect’s running count, he is at least the 67th person to die in federal immigration custody since Trump retook the White House. 

Earlier in the month, meanwhile, asylum seekers who have been trapped at GEO Group’s Folkston D. Ray James ICE Processing Center in Georgia, some for three years, published an open letter and two videos, explaining their situation, describing how ICE is keeping them in squalid, inhumane conditions, announcing a hunger strike, and identifying themselves by their names and A-numbers. 

Speaking to the Prospect shortly afterward, Samantha C. Hamilton, impact litigation staff attorney with the nonprofit legal advocacy Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said that guards swiftly retaliated against all the immigrants involved by forcing them into solitary confinement. 

“The same detention infrastructure has been in place under both Republicans and Democrats,” Hamilton said. “So is there something I hope a Democrat that comes into office can do? I think what they should do is try to do away with this system that incentivizes locking people up for profit, period, so that it’s not a profit-making scheme for anyone.”  

Immigration advocates said at least 500 people participated in the hunger strike, and that several were still refusing food as of last week.