For our November+December issue, we investigated the brutal rollout of President Donald Trump’s immigration police state: the surge in funding and manpower, the troubling arrests by masked agents, the increasing use of problematic tech, the incessant cruelty of the messaging, and the shadowy profiteers cashing in on the administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Read the whole package here.
When the Trump administration awarded a $1.26 billion contract this summer to build and operate a new tent city detention center in Texas, it made headlines, and not just because the facility, located at the Fort Bliss Army base, was expected to be the biggest of its kind in the country. The company that won the job, Acquisition Logistics, was so small it operated out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia. Almost nobody had heard of it. “A random house…just won $1.26 billion from ICE,” wrote the New Republic.
Whereas many companies with ICE contracts had long histories with immigrant detention, including private prison giants such as GEO Group, Acquisition Logistics had no prior experience in incarceration. Previously, its biggest federal contract was $16 million, and CEO Ken Wagner is circling retirement at 77. Over the summer, the company’s website was inaccessible to the public, with the header “Site maintenance in progress.” Archived screenshots showed the firm specializes in supply chain management. Could it safely operate a 5,000-bed detention facility?
Stranger still was the fact that the Navy, rather than ICE, awarded the contract. “It’s weird,” says Charles Tiefer, a professor emeritus of government contracting at the University of Baltimore law school. The administration has already tapped the Pentagon in unusual ways, including sending troops to help immigration officers along the Mexico border. And Fort Bliss has held incarcerated people in the past—most notably Japanese Americans during World War II. But why was the Navy awarding a contract for a facility on an Army base? “It seems messy,” says Claire Trickler-McNulty, an ICE official in the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The Navy’s deal with Acquisition Logistics to build a detention facility at Fort Bliss is akin to “a guy who is running a one-taxi firm” getting a “giant transportation contract.”
As it turns out, ICE had tried to award the contract, in April, to the firm Deployed Resources. It canceled the deal days later “for convenience,” according to a government website that cited an executive order about “wasteful spending.” Such a move is extremely unusual, and some current and former ICE officials speculate that Deployed lost the job for political reasons. Back in 2023, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the firm had snagged no-bid contracts for immigrant detention under President Joe Biden, and that a member of its board was married to Doug Emhoff’s former chief of staff, who later joined a sister company, Deployed Services. (The DC Enquirer interpreted all of this as “Kamala’s cronyism.”) A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson dismissed the speculation, saying the contract was canceled due to an “inability to meet the specialized needs of the facility.”
Weeks after ditching Deployed, ICE put the Fort Bliss contract out for bidding again, and then promptly pulled it a second time, without explanation. The deal finally went to Acquisition Logistics under a Navy contract program. (CEO Wagner is a former naval officer.) The program’s bidders are limited to small businesses, Tiefer explains, allowing the government to sidestep serious competition. It’s like “a guy who is running a one-taxi firm” getting a “giant transportation contract,” he says. “There’s no question that this job is going to be entirely done by the subcontractors.” And that’s the point, he adds.
Among the subcontractors is Disaster Management Group, owned by big-time Republican donor Nathan Albers, who spent time at Mar-a-Lago and once co-chaired a fundraiser at Trump National Golf Club with the president’s son Eric, according to ProPublica, which also reported that Albers’ previous company, TentLogix, had pleaded guilty in 2019 to hiring undocumented workers and then using a shell company to hide the fact from immigration authorities. DMG is “a friend of Trump,” notes Tiefer, and Acquisition Logistics is “a front.” Adds Trickler-McNulty: The Fort Bliss deal is “a giant pass-through to other companies.” (Neither DMG nor Acquisition Logistics answered questions for this story.)
The Government Accountability Office launched an investigation of the deal, but construction began anyway. In July, a Disaster Management subcontractor died in a workplace accident. By August, a month after Acquisition Logistics snagged the deal and shortly before a federal judge ordered Alligator Alcatraz closed (an order since overturned on appeal), the new site began accepting detainees. And in September, ICE’s own inspectors found that conditions at the facility violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, according to a Washington Post report that DHS dismissed as “fearmongering clickbait.” Contractors, the Post reported, did not provide proper medical care, lacked basic procedures to keep detainees safe, and for weeks did not give them a way to contact lawyers or file complaints.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.