Tag Archives: Congress

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Companies With Oregon Operations Eyeing Payoff From Trump’s Immigrant Deportations

Back in January, Portland’s new mayor, Keith Wilson, highlighted Portland’s commitment to its sanctuary city status, supported by Oregon’s sanctuary state laws and the Sanctuary Promise Act of 2021 that limit law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

“We stand together in solidarity with our immigrant families,” he wrote. “Their lives, families, and businesses are part of the fabric of our community and we must support them during these challenging times,” Wilson wrote in a letter to the City Council. “We must come together to live our city’s shared values of freedom from fear and sanctuary from federal overreach in the days ahead, no matter what our city may face.”

Governor Tina Kotek has also publicly and consistently affirmed her commitment to upholding Oregon’s sanctuary state laws. The governor “will not back down from a fight and believes these threats undermine our values and our right to govern ourselves,” a spokesperson for Kotek said, adding that the state “will not be bullied to deport people or perform immigration enforcement.”

A lot of Oregon’s politicians, particularly Democrats, may be on board with this pro-illegal-immigrant stance. But it looks like commerce trumps morality for much of the state’s business community. A long list of companies with operations in Oregon are perfectly happy to go after government contracts aimed at helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with immigrant deportations.

Open Secrets, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that tracks and publishes data on campaign finance and lobbying, has recently reported on for-profit companies in the United States benefiting from President Donald Trump’s plans to increase ICE deportations.

The coming windfall in deportation dollars could be immense. The House of Representatives approved a spending bill in early May that sets aside $175 billion for immigration enforcement – about 22 times ICE’s annual budget.

The bill includes the following provisions:

  • $46.5 billion for border barriers, including 701 miles of border wall, 900 miles of river barriers, 629 miles of secondary barriers, and 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers
  • $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities
  • $4.1 billion for hiring additional CBP personnel, including 3,000 new Border Patrol agents and 5,000 new Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers at ports of entry
  • $2 billion for retention bonuses and signing incentives for CBP personnel
  • $2.7 billion for border surveillance technology, including surveillance towers and tunnel detection capabilities
  • $500 million for grants to state and local law enforcement to track and monitor threats from unmanned aircraft systems
  • $450 million for Operation Stonegarden to support cooperation between CBP and state and local law enforcement

Open Secrets identified a slew of companies that are poised to benefit from President Trump’s plans to increase deportations. Every single one of them has operations in Oregon. According to Open Secrets, the companies and their contracted work are:

  • Palantir Technologies: In April 2024, ICE awarded software company Palantir Technologies a $29.8 million contract for developing ImmigrationOS, a tool to help ICE with identifying and prioritizing the deportations of individuals who are considered a risk, such as violent criminals; tracking who is self-deporting; and managing cases from the individual’s entry through detention, hearing and deportation. The tool is an extension of systems that Palantir has already delivered as part of its almost $128 million contract signed in 2022.
  • Deployed Resources: This emergency management company has been awarded over $4 billion in government contracts to build and operate border tents since 2016. On April 12,  2024, ProPublica reported that ICE awarded a new contract worth up to $3.8 billion to Deployed Resources to operate a migrant detention camp at Fort Bliss, a United States Army post in New Mexico and Texas. On April 17, ICE submitted a $5 million proposal for Deployed Resources to deliver unarmed guard services for 30 days at an ICE facility in El Paso, Texas. ICE has housed detainees at a tent facility in El Paso operated by Deployed Resources since March. The Trump administration used the Department of Defense to award Deployed Resources an unannounced $140 million contract to run the site for ICE, The facility can house up to 1,000 detainees, and ICE started transferring detainees on March 10.
  • Axon Enterprise: The company (formerly TASER International), which develops technology and weapons for public safety, law enforcement and the military,  was awarded a year-long $5.1 million contract in March to deliver body cams and equipment and a $22,376 contract to deliver tasers that have been used specifically in deportations. Several law enforcement agencies in Oregon use Axon tasers. Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon Enterprise, had a special distinction in 2024. His annual compensation, $165 million, topped CEO compensation charts in 2024 That propelled him past Apple’s Tim Cook, whose 2024 compensation totaled $74.61 million.
  • Parsons Government Services: The company is wrapping up a one-year $4.2 million contract for the transportation and guard services of ICE detainees in Newark, NJ.  It was awarded a contract worth up to $8.9 million for COVID-19 testing supplies in February, as well as an $87,467 contract in March and a $118,758 contract in April with ICE, both to provide “mobile biometric collection devices in support of the biometric identification transnational migration alert program.” 
  • General Dynamics: This weapons company was awarded new $101,034 and $80,050 contracts in March to purchase non-lethal ammunition for training purposes for ICE’s Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs.
  • Sig Sauer Inc.: A firearms company, Sig Sauer was awarded more than $200,000 worth of contracts with ICE for firearms and firearm accessories in the first months of 2025: $57,163 in February, and $19,824, $35,106 and $90,854 contracts in April. 
  • Paragon Professional Services: Awarded a $1.1 million contract on April 1 for transporting people who are detained by ICE in the New York City area and a $458,400 month-long contract to provide transportation of ICE detainees in Baltimore on April 17. ICE has also signed a five-year, $395,534 firm-fixed-price delivery order to Paragon Professional Services LLC, an Alaskan Native Corporation-owned small disadvantaged business. The contract provides transportation and guard services to support ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in the Newark, New Jersey area. This award is part of a larger Indefinite Delivery Contract valued at $315.1 million that Paragon holds with ICE for security and detention services.
  • GlobalX Air is a US 121 domestic flag and supplemental airline flying the Airbus A320 family of aircraft. Our services include domestic and international ACMI and charter flights for passengers and cargo throughout the US, Caribbean, Europe, and Latin America. GlobalX is IOSA certified by IATA and holds TCO’s for Europe and the UK.
  • GEO Group: A private prison company, GEO Group announced in February a 15-year contract with ICE for 1,000 beds at its Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey. The company said the contract is expected to add $60 million to its annual revenue in the first year. In March, GEO announced a contract with ICE for a 1,800 bed facility in Baldwin, Michigan. The contract is expected to generate $70 million in annual revenue. The company also announced in March that it altered its contract agreement for the 1,328-bed Karnes ICE Processing Center in Karnes City, Texas, to host “mixed populations” instead of solely single males. That contract is expected to generate $79 million in the first year, including $23 million in incremental revenue. Accusations of abuse and neglect of immigrants waiting for detention hearings have surfaced at Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, one of GEO’s facilities and one of the largest facilities of its kind in the nation, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The paper reported that a special office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched a sweeping investigation in 2024 into a litany of allegations at the center, but while the probe was still underway, the federal government gutted the special office in March 2025, raising questions about whether the investigation is still active as well as other inquiries into complaints of dangerous conditions and abuse against immigrants at centers across the country. 
  • CoreCivic: In March, CoreCivic, a private prison company, signed a five-year contract to reopen a 2,400-bed family detention center in Dilley, Texas. Annual revenue once fully operational is expected to be $180 million. In February, the company announced it would increase capacity for up to 784 ICE detainees at its 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, its 1,072-bed Nevada Southern Detention Center and its 1,600-bed Cimarron Correctional Facility in Oklahoma. In addition, CoreCivic has modified a contract so that ICE may use up to 252 beds at its 2,672-bed Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi.

  • CSI Aviation: This New Mexico-based company is ICE’s current prime air charter contractor.  CSI has signed contracts worth more than $650 million with ICE in the past three years. Included in that total is a no-bid contract awarded to CSI for deportation flights, worth up to $219 million. The contract began on March 1, runs until August and has the possibility to be extended until February 2026.
  • Air Carrier Subcontractors: CSI Aviation subcontracts deportation flights to several companies. Historically the vast majority of the flights were operated by World Atlantic and iAero, but now by Miami-based GlobalX, part of Global Crossing Airlines Group. Tom Cartwright, an immigration activist and watchdog, has noted that “Eastern Air, OMNI, and Kaiser operate flights rarely and Gryphon small jets are only used for long distance flights occasionally to Africa, the Pacific and Europe.” Budget carrier Avelo Airlines, which operates from the Salem-Willamette Valley Airport (SLE), Redmond Municipal Airport (RDM) and the Eugene Airport, recently signed a contract with ICE to fly three planes for deportations from Mesa, Arizona. 

To date, activists and others in Oregon concerned about  President Trump’s immigration policies have generally been silent about the actions of companies with Oregon operations that are facilitating those policies. Some activists around the country, including in Eugene, Oregon, have protested against Avelo Airlines, accusing it of profiting from deportation-related flights.

Demonstrators at Tweed New Haven, CT Airport on May 12, 2025 protesting Avelo Airlines’ decision to operate deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Generally, however, opposition to companies assisting ICE has been mild and barely noticed, unlike the raucus protests against American companies supplying U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, such as Dow Chemical, the primary manufacturer of napalm. 

But that relative calm may not last. The Trump administration has dramatically stepped up its pace of deportations, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data. In April, the latest month for which the data is available, ICE deported about 17,200 people and deportation numbers are expected to rise as more detention space is set up, deportation flights increase, and enforcement intensifies.  

Meanwhile, anti-Trump administration protests around the country are ramping up. On the horizon is the so-called “No Kings Day” protest on June 14, the same day as a massive Trump-initiated military parade in Washington, D.C. and  Trump’s 79th birthday.

The more such protests spread and grow, the more likely protest targets will expand as well.  Count on it.

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How Effective Are Oregon’s Members of Congress?

Oregon’s new Democratic Congresswoman is learning quickly how to play the game.

On March 24, 2025, Democratic Rep. Janelle Bynum and two other House members, Reps. Cleo Fields (D-LA) and Sam Liccardo (D-CA), introduced a bill, H.R. 2287. The bill would require the Federal Reserve to study the impact of certain U.S. tariffs on the cost of goods and services in the United States. 

“Every day I hear from my constituents that they’re struggling to afford groceries, rent, healthcare, and other necessities,” Bynum said in a press release. “Lowering costs has always been priority number one for me.”

Liccardo assailed Trump’s controversial tariffs “misguided economic measures” and said the study would allow Congress to advance “common-sense legislation that would provide much-needed relief to hard-working Americans.”

Of course, Bynum’s full-throated plea for a study on an issue of concern to her constituents got media coverage in Oregon – and that was the point. In fact, that was likely the whole point.

When I was a reporter at The Oregonian years ago, after serving on the staff of a House of Representatives subcommittee, I argued against giving a lot of coverage to bills when they were initially proposed by Oregon members of Congress. Far too often, they were just messaging bills, attempts to get publicity on a topic of interest to Oregonians, not serious legislative proposals with a high potential for enactment. 

After all, any member can go to legislative counsel and get a bill drafted. And a lot do. In the 118th Congress (2023-25), 10,564 bills were introduced in the House and 5,649 in the Senate. In contrast, the 118th Congress, which began on January 3, 2023, and ended on January 3, 2025, enacted just 274 public laws. 

What really matters is whether a bill gets a committee or subcommittee hearing and moves through the legislative process or key elements of the bill are incorporated in other legislation that does the same and become law. 

Truly effective lawmakers go beyond press releases.

The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL), a joint program of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, does deep dives into the work of every member of Congress and develops Legislative Effectiveness Scores based on a combination of fifteen metrics capturing the bills that each member of Congress sponsors, how far they move through the lawmaking process, and how substantial their policy proposals are.

The Center’s newest report on the Legislative Effectiveness of the 118th Congress (2023-25) was just released. 

Getting a little wonky, the Center provides a comprehensive explanation of its methodology.

For example, a Legislative Effectiveness Score for each member of the U.S. House and Senate captures the proven ability of a legislator to advance his or her agenda items through the legislative process and into law.

In the House, for example, the Center begins by identifying the number of bills that each member of the House of Representatives sponsored and the number of those bills that received any action in committee or action beyond committee on the floor of the House. The Center than categorized all bills as being commemorative, substantive or substantive and significant. A commemorative bill, for example, satisfied any one of several criteria, such as providing for a renaming, commemoration, private relief of an individual, and the like. 

For those bills that received any action beyond committee, the Center identified how many of those bills subsequently passed the House and how many became law. Members also get credit if a substantial portion of the language in their sponsored bills is incorporated into other legislators’ bills that become law. 

None of Oregon’s Representatives made the Center’s top 10 list of lawmakers in the 118thCongress (2023-25). 

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, however, came in 5th in the Center’s top 10 list of Senate Democratic lawmakers in the118th Congress. Merkley chaired the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, as well as chairing the Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight Subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee. He successfully advanced two sponsored bills into law: the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, and the Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act.

The Center also highlighted 12 High-Performing Freshmen who scored in the “Exceeds Expectations” category in their first terms in office. Notably, two of them were from Oregon, Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (6th) and Democrat Rep. Val Hoyle (9th). Hoyle was re-elected in November to represent Oregon’s 4th District. Chavez-DeRemer was defeated in her race, but was subsequently appointed Secretary of Labor by President Trump. 

Every member on this High Performing list had at least one of their sponsored bills become law or at least had the language from one of their sponsored bills substantially incorporated into another measure that ultimately became law.

“Given that…research suggests that performance in a legislator’s freshman term is highly correlated with subsequent lawmaking effectiveness, as well as with their overall career trajectory, we might expect to see these Representatives continuing to be effective lawmakers and setting the agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties in the future,” the Center’s report noted. 

So don’t take a slew of bills introduced by a member of Congress as an assurance of their impact. For a real understanding of legislative effectiveness, you have to dig a lot deeper.

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Dear Senator Merkley: anybody can write a bill

Anybody in Congress can write a bill.

That, in itself, isn’t much of an accomplishment. The real test is whether you can get your bill passed. Jeff Merkley, after 6 years in the Senate, doesn’t seem to understand that.

Senator Jeff Merkley

Senator Jeff Merkley

In an effort to portray himself as an accomplished legislator, Merkley has a TV ad out asserting, “….I wrote a bill to make China play fair on trade.” The problem is Merkley’s bills never passed.

When I served in Washington, D.C. as staff on a subcommittee of the House of Representatives, I worked with the Legislative Counsel’s office to draft dozens of bills at the request of the subcommittee chairman and ranking minority member. That’s the easy part. The tough part is getting something through the entire legislative process in the Senate and House and signed into law. That is the grueling work, depending on persistence, personal relationships, hard work and knowledge of the legislative process.

As a newspaper reporter after leaving Washington, I argued on numerous occasions against writing up lengthy stories on bills submitted by Oregon’s members of Congress just because they’d been put in the hopper. It’s a too common tactic by legislators to garner media coverage on a topic without actually having to do anything substantive.

The public is too often fooled by this tactic because they either don’t understand the legislative process or don’t assiduously follow the progress, or lack thereof, of proposed legislation.

Merkley’s clearly trying to pull a fast one. The ad should come down.

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Merkley’s money: pick your poison

I got a friendly personal note from Senator Jeff Merkley the other day. Well, it was addressed to me and had his signature, so I think it was personal.

Anyway, he told me that if I’m “fed up with special interests always getting their way in Washington” he needs my help because “the special interests that are used to calling the shots are hell-bent on defeating me in 2014.” And in a kind of ironic twist, he said he needs lots of money because every supporter he adds today will be “a rejection of the big money politics that’s created a government by and for the powerful.”

This is the same man who has raised nearly $8 million from the special interests that he embraces, particularly unions, lawyers and law firms, and real estate interests. In the DC game, it’s more a matter of picking your poison than staying pure.

specialinterests

During 2009 -2014, principal contributors to Merkley’s campaign have been:

 

Industry    Total raised       From Individuals From PACS
lawyers/law firms $337,313 $259,615 $77,698
Leadership PACs $166,500 0 $166,500
Real estate interests $146,868 $74,358 $72,510
Building trade unions $117,000 0 $117,000

 

The lawyer/law firm contributors include the American Association for Justice, also known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America ($26,000) and the Boston-based law firm, Thornton & Naumes ($25,000). Thornton & Naumes is a heavy hitter in the contributions game, having contributed $326,250 so far during the 2014 election cycle. That made it the top contributor to 23 members of Congress, all but one a Democrat.

The trial lawyers have been long-time big-time money machine for the Democratic Party. Already losing tort-reform battles in states run by Republican governors and legislatures, and threatened by the GOP-led House, the trial lawyers are deathly afraid of having to deal with a GOP-led Senate, too, so they’re manning the barricades and handing out cash..

Another special interest heavily invested in Merkley is the real estate industry, blamed by some for exacerbating the housing collapse by promoting easy-credit policies.

Then there are the unions. Now there’s a special interest.   Unions making big contributions to Merkley in the 2014 election cycle include:

  • International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, $30,000
  • Communications Workers of America, $25,000
  • National Electrical Contractors Assn., $25,000
  • International Association of Fire Fighters, $23,500
  • Operating Engineers Union, $20,000
  • Teamsters Union, $20,000
  • Painters & Allied Trades Union, $18,000
  • International Longshoremen’s Association, $18,000
  • International Association of State/County/Municipal Employees, $16,500.

In 2013, the union membership rate–the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions–was 11.3 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, was 14.5 million.

The strongest union representation in 2013 was with public-sector workers, which had a union membership rate (35.3 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.7 percent). This reflects a fairly steady decline in union membership over the years. Thirty years ago, for example, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

Unions in the United States are waging an aggressive effort to maintain their membership and to support union-friendly government policies. And Merkley’s on board.