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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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College Protests and the Law of Unintended Consequences

An intervention in a complex system always creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg understands unintended consequences. “[W]e all know that sometimes people mean well but cause harm nonetheless—out of ignorance, out of carelessness, out of deeply ingrained ways of thinking they haven’t examined, out of an emotional reaction that got the better of their lofty intentions, or … well, the list goes on,” she says.

There’s a message here for today’s rabid pro-Palestine student protesters convinced that their actions will bring about change.

If they are trying to emulate the protests against the Vietnam war in 1960s, the bloodiest and most dramatic of which occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, they’re forgetting something. Those protests may have helped drive out President Lyndon Johnson, but they undermined the candidacy of the Democratic candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, and invigorated the conservative supporters of Republican Richard Nixon.

In his first months in office, Nixon had the U.S. military increase, not decrease, its pressure on the battlefield and, in violation of international law, ordered secret bombings of North Vietnamese camps in Cambodia.

After he took office, another 21,200 Americans died in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, about one-third of all American deaths in the war (58,220), along with an estimated half a million Vietnamese., 

Nixon’s aggressive pursuit of the war also led to more protests on college campuses with deadly consequences. During one of those protests at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. Just 10 days later, another two students at Jackson State University were killed by police.

Paul Berman, an American writer on politics and literature, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post, about being involved as a Columbia University student in a late April 1968 campus uprising. He wrote about how professors upbraided him, warning about the potential dangers of the protests.

“The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, ” Berman wrote.” In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger. Foolish left-wing radicalism had helped undermine the German universities, which ought to have been a place of anti-Nazi resistance. They wanted me to understand, all in all, that what people think they are doing might not be what they are actually doing, and, in the name of high ideals, society might be weakened, and the worst of disasters might be brought about.”

I bring all this up to remind today’s aggrieved student protesters that their aggressive actions may not lead events to where they want them to go. 

First, despite the protesters’ assumption that their peers have their back, the annual Harvard Youth Poll, run by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard’s Kennedy School, found that  Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are not prioritizing the Israel-Gaza conflict. 

The poll found that young people are more worried about inflation, health care, housing and gun violence. The survey listed 16 issues facing the U.S., asking respondents which of two randomly paired issues most concerned them. The conflict in the Middle East ranked near the bottom at 15th.

The general public also can’t be counted on to support the protesters. Americans are actually quite divided about how – and whether – the U.S. should be involved in the Israel-Hamas war. According to the Pew Research Center, among US adults, only 22% say Hamas’ reasons for fighting Israel are valid and roughly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid. 

In this environment, the student protests, particularly if they continue with violent events at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, may, as in 1968, lead to a conservative backlash that helps defeat President Biden and elect Donald Trump.

For most of the protesting students, that would surely be a worst case of unintended consequences. 

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“War, huh. What’s it good for?

On this Memorial Day, it seems like the United States has been at war for most of my lifetime. The cost in American lives has been unbearable. Parents of friends, and friends themselves, have died. The financial cost has been astronomical. The impact on our culture has been massive. The resulting erosion of trust in government has been substantial. What have we accomplished?

Vietnam

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used reports of attacks on two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin as political cover for a Congressional resolution that gave him broad war powers in Vietnam. There were only two dissenting votes, Senators Morse of Oregon and Gruening of Alaska.

As American involvement in the war and body counts escalated, so did anti-war protests at home. The end came when Saigon in South Vietnam fell to the communists in April 1975.

VietnamUStroops

David Halberstam wrote “The Best and the Brightest” about the overconfident people in leadership roles in the United States who pursued the war.

“The basic question behind the book,” he said, “was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.” (The term “Best and the brightest “ has often been twisted since then to mean the top, smart people, the opposite of Halberstam’s original meaning)

Now, 41 years later, the U.S. and Vietnam are reconciling. The U.S. wants the business opportunities that are expected to open up in Vietnam and a counterweight to Chinese adventurism.

vietnamObama

President Obama reviewing a guard of honor during a welcoming ceremony at Vietnam’s Presidential Palace in Hanoi, May 23, 2016.

 

Cost of the Vietnam War to the United States                                            $173 billion

U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War                                             58,220

Grieving families of U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War       58,220

 

Afghanistan

The Afghanistan war began in October 2011 to oust the Taliban that sheltered al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

USTroopsInAfghanistan

The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan ended its combat mission in December 2014, according to the White House.

In terms of Western goals — things are right back where they started: needing to keep Afghanistan free of extremists and a viable country for its people, CNN recently reported. The result is thousands of refugees and a continued safe haven for ISIS.

The Taliban currently controls more territory than at any time since 2001, when it ruled from the capital, Kabul, Western defense officials say, and the United Nations says civilian casualties are at a high since it began keeping records in 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The United Nations said 3545 civilians were killed in 2015 as Taliban stepped up attacks after British and American troops left at end of 2014.

Furthermore, U.S. intelligence agencies have been warning the White House that the Taliban could seize more Afghan territory, including population centers, during this summer’s fighting season, in part because the Afghan government and its military forces are so weak, according to the Journal.

 

Cost of the war in Afghanistan to the United States                            $686 billion

U.S. military fatal casualties of the war in Afghanistan                          2,381

Grieving families of U.S. military fatal casualties                                      2,381

Iraq

On March 19, 2003, the United States and coalition forces, began a war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, the Sunni leader of Iraq.

When explosions from Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from U.S. fighter-bombers and warships in the Persian Gulf began to rock Baghdad, President George W. Bush said in a televised address, “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

husseinstatue

U.S. soldiers hold back crowds as the statue of Saddam Hussein falls in Baghdad, April 9, 2003, by Peter Nicholls

The Shia-led governments that have held power since Hussein was toppled have struggled to maintain order and the country has enjoyed only brief periods of respite from high levels of sectarian violence. Violence and sabotage have continued to hinder the revival of an economy shattered by decades of conflict and sanctions.

Politically and economically, Iraq’s trajectory is currently a negative one, Brookings said recently. The country is politically fragmented at all levels and the centrifugal forces appear to be gaining strength. This, in turn, has paralyzed the government, suggesting that the most likely paths for Iraq are toward a situation analogous to the Lebanon of today.

Cost of the Iraq War to the United States                                             $818 billion

U.S. military fatal casualties of the Iraq War                                             4,491

Grieving families of U.S. military fatal casualties of the Iraq War       4,491

 

“War, huh

Good God, y’all

What is it good for?”

      “War” by Edwin Starr