Privatizing the Immigration Police

Like other government agencies, ICE contracts out many of its core functions to private companies. ICE’s Office of Acquisition Management describes itself as a “full business partner” that “serves as a strategic asset dedicated to improving the agency’s overall business performance” by procuring everything from handcuffs and guns to interpreter services and information technology for the agency. Notably, the office also outsources its “detention and removal services,” giving private prison companies contracts to operate detention facilities and paying private charter airlines to fly detainees to El Salvador and other countries.

ICE’s use of private security firms like Allied Universal to transport immigrants in its custody dates back to the earliest days of the agency. G4S Secure Solutions, the Allied subsidiary, signed its first contract with ICE in 2003, back when the company was known as the Wackenhut Corporation.

The company’s evolution is a case study in the growth of the murky private security companies that ICE relies on to help conduct deportations, which have consolidated and expanded significantly over the last two decades.

Before the Wackenhut Corporation was subsumed into a multinational private security conglomerate, it was already one of the United States’ biggest private security providers, with ties to the nation’s growing prison industry. G4S Secure Solutions emerged after the Wackenhut Corporation was acquired in 2002 by a Danish private security firm, Group 4 Falck, to take advantage of heightened demand for private security in the United States post-9/11.

In 2010, Wackenhut was rebranded officially as G4S Secure Solutions, and in 2021 (after a lengthy bidding war), Allied Universal acquired the company, officially cementing itself as the largest private security provider in the world.

Like other ICE transportation contractors, G4S Secure Solutions also provides security to private companies and militaries around the world. It has drawn scrutiny for providing guards to Israeli prisons and to oil companies in the Middle East, work that has given it a reputation as a “global mercenary firm.”

Acuity International, the Virginia-based company that just secured a $985 million contract to transport unaccompanied migrant children under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which is now headed by a former ICE official), has a similar backstory. The company, formerly known as Caliburn International, has contracted in the past with the Iraqi military. Under the first Trump administration, its subsidiary operated a shelter for migrant children that faced a congressional inquiry over its finances and various accusations of mismanagement.

As of this year, G4S Secure Solutions is providing “tactical transport operations” to ICE field offices in San Antonio, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and other locations, per federal procurement records, making it a central player in regions with high concentrations of arrests.

“Shackled and Arrested”

Although contracts between immigration authorities and transportation providers like G4S typically limit the contractors’ job to “ground transportation and facility guard services,” there are indications that ICE’s legions of private security guards have taken on a bigger role.

In 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought a lawsuit against ICE, alleging that G4S Secure Solutions had “shackled and arrested” an immigrant on behalf of ICE, then transported him to ICE offices. Federal immigration law does not authorize private contractors to make immigration arrests, as ACLU attorneys argued in their lawsuit.

The ACLU’s suit alleged the arrest was part of a pattern: “Many [immigrants] are arrested not by ICE officers or employees, but rather by third-party private contractors who have no lawful authority to make immigration arrests,” attorneys wrote in the lawsuit. In California, the suit alleged that this was common at prisons and jails, where private contractors with G4S would wait for an immigrant to be released to quickly detain them.

Ultimately, the ACLU settled with federal immigration officials, barring G4S employees from carrying out immigration arrests in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. But it’s unclear whether G4S has continued similar practices elsewhere.

In G4S’s recent job postings, the company advertises “immediate job opportunities” for ICE transport officers, with such duties as “armed transportation services, escorting detainees to and from transport vehicles, and monitoring detainees in custody.”

G4S was also accused in a 2019 lawsuit brought by the ACLU of shackling nine women and transporting them for hours in the back of a hot van without air conditioning or ventilation. The civil rights group called the incident “part of the federal government’s appalling pattern of shackling detainees for lengthy journeys with complete disregard for their safety.”

These issues extend beyond G4S.

Doorstep to Doorstep

Last year, a father and son — both asylum seekers — who were separated from each other for years during the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against MVM, Inc., a private security company, for transporting “thousands of abducted children away from their parents,” attorneys wrote in the case. Its armed guards escorted children into “unmarked cars” and onto planes, they wrote, “despite grave warnings that this practice inflicted severe mental suffering on parents and children.”

In 2018, MVM admitted that it had held children overnight in a vacant building, in violation of its contract with ICE. Even after that revelation, and other concerns about MVM’s handling of children in its custody, the company was granted additional federal contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. MVM currently has several job openings for ICE youth transport jobs, per its website.

The lawsuit against MVM recently cleared a major hurdle when a California judge overseeing the case ruled against some of MVM’s defenses and is now moving forward.

Among other things, the case raised concerns about whether the private transportation officers had received proper training: “There was no requirement that the individual be trained in childcare or trauma-informed services or possess other appropriate experiences unique to vulnerable children, much less abducted children,” the complaint in the case says.

“As we allege, we don’t believe that the people the contractor was employing to transport children were properly equipped for that role,” Van Houten Harper, one of the attorneys litigating the case, told the Lever.

This is a frequent concern raised about the private security guards that ICE and other federal immigration authorities use to transport migrants, many of whom have been accused of misconduct over the years. One guard with private security contractor, New York–based ISS Action, Inc., was accused in a 2022 lawsuit of sexually assaulting a minor in Customs and Border Protection’s custody in McAllen, Texas, court records show. (ISS Action denied the claims in legal pleadings, and the company’s CEO did not respond to a request for comment from the Lever. It is unclear whether the accused guard still holds a position at the company.)

ISS Action has received more than $100 million over the last three years from its contracts with US Customs and Border Protection, to which it provides “ground transportation and guard services.” It also recently scored a new contract with ICE for “emergency detention and related services,” amid the current administration’s immigration spending bonanza, federal procurement records show.

Other major beneficiaries of federal transportation contracts include Trailboss Enterprises, an Alaska-based transportation company that contracts with Customs and Border Protection — and the private charter airlines that contract with ICE Air.

Even as the cottage industry of transportation for ICE expands, the operations of many of the companies providing guards and vans to shuttle migrants across the country remain opaque.

Many of these contractors are backed by private equity, including G4S — Allied Universal is backed in part by Canadian private equity firm CDPQ — and Acuity International, which is partially backed by DC Capital Partners. The fact that these vendors are privately held (unlike private prison firms such as GEO Group or CoreCivic, which are public companies) further shields them from public scrutiny and disclosure.

Allied Universal spends on average $800,000 annually lobbying lawmakers in Washington, DC, in recent years, federal disclosures show.

“That is why companies like Allied have this very long-standing relationship with ICE — decades in the making — because they are reliably obscure, and ICE really benefits from that,” said Azani Creeks, senior research coordinator at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which has been investigating the ties between ICE transportation vendors like G4S Secure Solutions and private equity.

She emphasized that ICE’s deportations, which rely on contractors to lease its vans and staff its operations, “wouldn’t be possible without Allied Universal.”