Yves here. This post by border Todd Miller corrects widespread misperceptions about what he calls the deportation industrial complex. The militarization of the southern border, including its infamous wall, goes back to the Bush era. Biden increased spending on deportation infrastructure by more than 50% compared to the level in the first Trump term; Miller called Biden “the king of border contracts.” Biden also refused to remove concertina wire installed by Trump, ignoring the requests of the mayor of Nogales.
Towards the close of the piece, Miller turns to a seldom-mentioned driver of emigration to the US: climate change. Many farmers and fishermen are not longer able to eke out a living due to water shortages and scorching temperatures.
So even though Trump’s enthusiasm for harsh treatment of illegal immigrants verges on blood lust, it’s not as if substantively Biden or Obama were all that much nicer.
By Todd Miller. Originally published at TomDispatch
It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.
As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.
In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points — namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.
But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?
In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.
And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.
In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.
In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.
The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.
The Bipartisan Border Consensus
In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).
There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.
The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.
From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one — maybe three years old — jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than four million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.
About a year later, on January 20th, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”
Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.
Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.
The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.
As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.
“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”
Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.
“You’re losing money?” I ask.
“Every day,” he replies.
It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake — except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.
Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.
Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.
On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which — for me — climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a mega-drought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.
The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.
“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.
“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.
Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.
It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.
Copyright 2025 Todd Miller
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Probably need another word other than “immigration” to describe what’s going on.
Seems like they import people as fast as they export people. It’s like a labor and prison industrial complex rotation.
My take is that Trump and the Repugs are all about the performative cruelty, while the D’s are all about the Legalism. The results, however, are the largely the same: Imperialism and extraction, desperate, displaced people, cheap labor and money-to-be-made in facilitating it all.
Excellent! We clearly need to spend more time and energy discussing the Biden administration because it’s not like there is a coup d’etat under way.
Oh, yeah….
Right, the sooner we stop discussing the Biden administration, the sooner the Dems can rebuild the pretense that they will do something different.
When they tell you who they are, believe them. Then don’t forget two years later.
Supporters of the duopoly don’t want us to remember how we got to where we are at today: the history they cite (if any) is glossy and revisionist at best, or purely fictional– what isn’t recycled goes straight to the memory-hole.
Give it an election-cycle or two, and this article will be disappeared from the web as “misinformation.”
The author was certainly correct to highlight the continuity of policies between administrations, if only to highlight the lack of substantive fundimental change whenever there is a “transfer of power.”
Of course, if I was a democrat, any mention or reminder of the Biden administration would probably piss me off and set me off too: like a really, really bad hangover, it’s gonna take a while for them to get human again let alone civil.
The story here is continuity, not change.
We destabilize and destroy economies abroad for profit and figure out new ways to profit off the pain and suffering we’ve caused. Been at this for over a hundred years at the Mexico border.
The domestic coup d’etat thing started as I recall last summer when Genocide Joe “opted to not run”, again the story is continuity, not change. The depth of continuity, going back to my youthful resistance to Apartheid in South Africa, didn’t really register for me until I realized the Musk, Thiel, Netanyahoo nexus around Trump, we’re back in the 70s, and all the worst aspects of the period, which should have been no surprise as that was the formative period for the Donald.
And your Dems, who’s misdeeds you like us to turn a blind eye to, are doing what exactly to prevent this “coup d’etat”? It is possible to admonish both the Democrat administrations for creating the tools and the Trump administration for using them.
Net immigration to the US skyrocketed to an alltime high under Biden, far above the levels encountered during the previous three presidents. I don’t even have a strong opinion on that, not being a US citizen. But this fact is peculiarly missing from the article. (not that I find this choice very surprising, considering that it was published on TomDispatch)
Your complaint is of the sort Lambert often mentions, of criticizing the author for not writing about penguins when that is outside the scope of the piece. This is about deportation infrastructure spending and that as evidence that the Dems are not as anti-deportation as they now pretend. It’s not about deportation policy generally.
So pray tell, how do you square the rise in immigration that with the >50% increase in deportation infrastructure spending under Biden v. Trump 1.0? Was Biden’s big increase in the number he let in up to 2024, when he cut back bigly, meant to be a self-licking ice cream cone?
Bumping up spending on deportation infrastructure by >50% seems rather inadequate when immigration increased by >400%. The net results are very apparent in recent population statistics:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-estimates.html [Figure 2 is most relevant.]
The backlog in immigration courts has also risen sharply: https://trac.syr.edu/reports/734/. The report is is a little dated, but if you extrapolate to today, the backlog has probably risen four-fold. The number of immigration judges has only increased 75%.
So yes, the Democrats helped grow the size of deportation infrastructure in the US. But they did not do so nearly enough to handle the increased number of immigrants that came across the border in recent years.
Did you miss that Biden INCREASED immigration from 2020 to 2023 via executive order? This was policy and not an accident.
You are assuming they were “illegals” when Biden was giving various waivers to give them a regularized status, if short of “I have a long term visa” level secure. See the big group of Somalis who all went to Yellow Springs in Ohio as workers an example, the ones accused of eating pets. That was through a regularized waiver process.
So your assumption that they were all illegal is false, at least in the Biden framework. Trump has unwound a lot of these Biden provisions.
With all due respect, I made no assumptions regarding “legal” vs “illegal” whatsoever. My comment mentioned neither word, and it really wasn’t part of my thinking.
But even with a regularized waiver process, a greater than 4-fold increase in the number of immigrants would necessitate more deportations, simply due to the fact that some portion of these “now legal” immigrants will behave badly once they get here. People vary. Long-term residents of the US vary. Newly-arrived immigrants vary. Most are good people who work hard and treat others well. Other contribute less. Some commit crimes. Some are part of gangs looking to establish criminal enterprises on day one.
And the vetting processes for immigrants are imperfect. So it’s very natural to expect that with a big increase in the number of immigrants, you’d get a proportionate increase in the number of immigrants that “don’t work out” and have to be deported. And the growth we’ve seen in the immigration court backlog pretty much confirms that.
And yes, I will confess: I was unaware the Biden deliberately increased immigration from 2020 to 2023 via executive order. But given that he did, it makes sense that they’d increase the size of the deportation infrastructure to deal with the particular immigrants that misbehave.
So now we get the “best” of both worlds: Increased deportations that make immigration activists and a subset of liberals very unhappy. And increased immigration that makes conservatives and a different subset of liberals (those more concerned with the strain on social services and housing supply) very unhappy. This surely didn’t help Democrats in November.
You are making an awful lot of assumptions about Biden policies with no links and no facts, when you admit you were so inattentive that you didn’t even realize they’d chosen to greatly liberalize it. US funded NGO were even helping migrants get through Central America and across Mexico.
And why should one assume an increase in deportations? The 1.4 million final deportation order that have not been enforced says non-deportation was the policy. Right wingers maintain that the reason for the big immigrant wave was to assure a permanent Democratic majority, based on the belief that immigrants would overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Thank you so much for this post!!!
Ya have to have a PHD in bigotry to administer hokum – If a policy is the same or worse than the opponents, then to earn your PHD…. you have to point to the opponent as the bad guy administering bad medicine while touting yours as the better brand.
It has been going on for long long time……
From the 1920’s
“In the United States, people are wont to talk feverishly and vindictively about the “non-taxpayer”, for it is here that our brother from Mexico, our cousin from over the Canadian Border, our friends from India and the Middle East come to escape the rigors of their respective locations
They proceed to use our highways and our libraries, our water systems and our police protection. If they have children old enough and stay long enough, they use our public schools etc., whereupon there is a great cry about non-taxpayers taking advantage of our benefits of government. Because these visitors and temporary residents don’t own property and are not listed with the tax man, the general supposition is that they pay no taxes.
A itemized account of the money spent by these “guests” over a period of time would yield some surprises. Naturally, the itemization includes practically everything permanent residents would buy, food, clothing, housing, luxuries and the usual necessities.
A little thought will show clearly that while the guest owned no property here, the hotel proprietor, the restaurateur, the merchant, the grocer, the druggist, everyone in fact, from whom he made purchases did own property, and that property was subject to taxation. The tax on the buildings and merchandize was simply added to the other overhead expenses in the bill of the proprietor and merchant.
The property owner acted as a collector and ultimate consumer, whether a native son or a wandering guest, paid the tax. The guest who owned no property himself in the United States paid a tax whenever he slept with a roof over his head, paid taxes every time he bought a cigar or steak. A man could no more pass through the United States and purchase a meal or a night’s lodging without paying taxes than he could buy a gallon of gasoline for his car without paying the gasoline tax.
The “non-taxpayer”? He belongs to the class of griffins and unicorns and other fabulous animals. There is no such creature.”
One important point here is that as the “border security”/deportation infrastructure exploded over the past 50 years, beginning especially under Clinton, the seasonal workforce that had migrated back & forth for generations, more & more became permanent residents due to the cost & danger of migrating back & forth.
One reason for the increase under Biden was that migrants were instructed to claim political asylum, even though the vast majority didn’t qualify under the rules. The immigration court system, already grossly underfunded & understaffed was overwhelmed.
Miller’s main point about climate refugees is spot on, although I wish he talked a little about many migrants being the victims of neo-liberalism.
I spent some years doing humanitarian work in Honduras and my impression is exactly yours. Other than agricultural work or menial labor there is nothing for these people to do. Our valley was settled in about 1950 by two hispanic men who eventually brought wives and life was good. They had plenty of land. Within 40 years the population of the valley had exploded to 10,000 and the mountains were stripped bare due to logging, farming and susequent erosion. Each plot was continuously subdivided by each family until there was not enough land for sustenance. The only option was to come to the United States and many did. They often returned and ultimately the valley was supported almost completely by workers in the US and even agriculture fell by the wayside. I bet in this Mexican town the author describes it is the same. The entire town is supported by US transfer payments. What seemed to make this a big issue is when the asylum and anchor baby game system took over. Going to the US was a one way street. No one came back. Offering temporary work permits and eliminating birthright citizenship and temporary asylum that extends to forever would really help the situation more than shipping people back. The shipping back is doomed to failure. If getting shipped back seems likely I suppose one just needs to get pregnant which is not that hard to do. Unfortunately despite our best efforts birth control was a tough sell in this patriarchal society where the men get to decide on sex and birth control and where the men do not have to worry about supporting the children. If we are to continue with birthright citizenship and easy unenforced asylum the US would be wise to just annex these countries and make them retirement destinations while the natives go north to work. Imagine the prosperity if US law prevailed and the 5 freeway was extended to Cabo San Lucas and the UAW could organize Mexican auto workers. The entire coast would end up like Southern California. The car junkyards would be gone and mile after mile of ticky tacky million dollar condos would take their place. Such a strategy would be Trumpian, I guess, considering his plans for Gaza which I could get behind if he made all the natives of Gaza and Palestine US citizens free to live and work in the USA as opposed to transferring them to other poverty stricken and insanely overpopulated locations like Egypt and Jordan. If we can’t do that give them temporary work permits.
There are many excellent points here. But blaming the increasing poverty in the third world on climate change is – for now – not correct.
I looked up the annual precipitation in Mexico on a site called “Trading Economics” and it’s been essentially flat since at least 1923. I look up the population of Mexico on wikipedia, in 1940 it was 19.6 million. By 2020 it was about 126 million. So: precipitation is constant, and the population increases by not quite seven fold. How can we possibly blame climate change for increasing water shortages in Mexico? (And so many other places like Mexico). I fail to see the error of my logic here.
I don’t blame the Mexican people – I blame Mexico’s abusive historical cheap-labor pro-natalist policies, as well as the lies of commission and omission of globalist oligarchs like Elon Musk and their armies of intellectual whores. I agree that global warming is a long-term threat and we should be worried about it, a lot. Even with constant rainfall, higher temperatures can increase evaporation that is sure – but not enough to reduce water supplies by a factor of 7, not yet (and while the literature is confusing, I think it can also be the case that overuse of groundwater can dry out surface soil and cause increased heating that way). It is surely also the case that massive population growth increases the production of greenhouse gases, all other things being equal. If the world had been allowed to stabilize at the (recent) population density of Canada, would we now be facing such an existential threat?
But I also blame us. We have been so conditioned to avoid any discussion of the effects of excessively rapid population growth as ‘racist’ or ‘scapegoating immigrants’ that we refuse to see the elephant in the room. It’s long past time that we saw the elephant.
While I appreciate you agreeing that the post has merit, your criticism is not well founded.
First, this is straw manning, which is a violation of our written site Policies. He never attributed poverty rates in Mexico to climate change.
Second, your stats do not prove your contention. Merely saying the population has increased does not establish that it has grown to exceed water resources as of when the increase started, which is what the baseline would need to be for an apples-to-apples comparison. You have not presented any evidence that demand for water has contributed to more aridity or the examples provided in the post, which I feel compelled to provide again:
The piece specifically describes DEPOPULATION in the area, yet continued reduction of water supply, contradicting your thesis.
It took less than a minute to find that Mexico has been suffering from severe droughts as well as overly business friendly water policy:
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/01/in-mexico-xalapas-chronic-water-scarcity-reflects-a-deepening-national-crisis/
The article does mention overpopulation as contributing, but repeatedly cites (in addition to climate change as the big driver) corruption, looting, and poor water management as more important. In other words, it strongly suggests that population would not be creating pressure ex these other factors.