The Current Theater
Part 5 of THE SUPPLY CHAIN - A Series on Immigration, Empire, and the Lie We Tell Ourselves
Let’s talk about right now. Because everything we’ve traced across 400 years of history is not ancient. It is not settled. It is happening in real time, with receipts, and the receipts are extraordinary.
Let’s start with who is running this operation and where they came from.
John Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who, starting in 1979, built the intellectual infrastructure of the modern American immigration restriction movement from scratch. He founded FAIR — the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He co-founded the Center for Immigration Studies, the think tank whose research gets cited in congressional testimony and presidential speeches. He founded NumbersUSA, the grassroots lobbying organization that flooded the Senate with a million faxes in 2007 and helped kill George W. Bush’s bipartisan immigration reform bill. He coined the phrase “immigrant invasion.” He ran The Social Contract Press, which published white nationalist writers. He founded a pro-eugenics organization called the Society for Genetic Education. He corresponded for decades with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers, and leading white nationalist intellectuals — his own letters, stored in 15 boxes at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, document it all.
FAIR received more than $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund — a foundation created to encourage what it called “race betterment,” which the London Sunday Telegraph described as a “neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics.” Tanton himself introduced FAIR leaders to the Pioneer Fund’s president at a private club. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated both FAIR and CIS as hate groups.
The man who runs daily 10am enforcement calls from the White House demanding 3,000 arrests per day — Stephen Miller — has been steeped in this network since his college years. The policy papers his operation cites come from CIS. The legislative frameworks come from FAIR’s legal arm. The grassroots pressure comes from NumbersUSA. One man built the entire ideological architecture that is now running American immigration enforcement from the West Wing. That man corresponded with Holocaust deniers and received money from a eugenics fund. This is not just guilt by association. These are documented facts in a library available to anyone who wants to look.
That is the intellectual foundation of the current enforcement regime.
Now let’s look at what the enforcement regime actually does — and who profits from it.
On election night 2024, before a single policy had been announced, before a single law had been passed, two stocks surged the moment the results came in. GEO Group — private prison company — jumped 42%. CoreCivic — private prison company — jumped 29%. The people who run private detention knew exactly what was coming, because they had helped pay for it. GEO Group and CoreCivic had donated $2.78 million to Trump’s campaign. This was not a coincidence. This was an investment with an expected return.
The return came. By 2025, ICE detention had risen from 39,000 people to 73,000 — a 75% increase. Ninety percent of that detention is run by for-profit corporations. The government pays $152 per person per day. The detainees are paid $1 per day for labor inside the facilities.
Read that last sentence again.
One dollar a day. For labor. Inside a detention facility. Run by a private corporation. Paid for by the federal government. In 2025. A federal jury in Washington State already ruled in 2021 that GEO Group violated minimum wage laws by paying detained workers $1 per day — and ordered $17.3 million in back wages. GEO Group appealed. The practice continued in other facilities.
Because the biggest cost in running a detention center is labor, and if you can shift that cost onto the people you’re caging, the profit margins improve considerably.
CoreCivic’s own financial disclosures state plainly that “the demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities.” In plain English: their business model requires the government to keep arresting people because they have a financial interest in criminalization.
They lobbied for it. Between 2008 and 2014, GEO Group and CoreCivic spent a combined $16 million on federal lobbying, much of it targeting the DHS Appropriations Subcommittee that controls the immigration detention bed quota. They spent millions to ensure the beds stayed full and that’s exactly what happened. In the last 20 years, ICE revenue grew sevenfold for GEO Group — from 6% to 43% of their total revenue. Immigration detention is now their core business.
The modern private prison corporation was invented in 1983 when two men strung barbed wire around a motel in Houston, Texas, to cage immigrants for the federal government. Forty-two years later, the descendants of that motel operation hold 73,000 human beings and bill the American taxpayer $152 a day per body while paying those bodies $1 a day to clean the floors.
The supply chain did not end. It found new paperwork.
Now let’s look at what the enforcement actually produced.
The administration claimed 605,000 to 622,000 deportations in 2025, plus 1.9 million “self-deportations.” Independent tracking by TRAC documented approximately 290,000 ICE removals — only 7% above Biden-era numbers. Of the people detained, 73.6% had never been convicted of any crime. Not charged with anything serious. Not accused of anything violent. Never convicted of anything at all.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — written when John Adams was president, designed for wartime use against citizens of enemy nations — was invoked to deport 238 Venezuelan men to El Salvador without hearings, without due process, without the legal proceedings the statute itself requires. Federal courts, including judges appointed by Trump himself, ruled it exceeded statutory authority. No additional removals have been made under that authority since March 2025. The administration simply moved on to the next performance.
Worksite raids: 40-plus actions, 1,100-plus worker arrests, $1 million in employer fines. One employer prosecution. One. Probation. No jail.
The Hyundai battery plant raid in September 2025 arrested 475 workers in a single action — the largest single-site raid in DHS history. The plant kept operating. Hyundai was not prosecuted.
One hundred and seventy American citizens were detained by ICE — people with documentation, with birth certificates, with every legal right to be in this country, detained anyway. Three were killed by ICE agents. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the prior four years combined. Five of the eleven deaths in ICE custody in December and January alone occurred in GEO Group or CoreCivic facilities.
And then came June 2025. The moment the curtain came all the way down when ICE was ordered internally to hold all worksite enforcement on agriculture and hospitality. Not slow it down. Hold it. Pause completely. Because farmers had called their congresspeople. Because the food supply was genuinely at risk. Because 42% of the people picking American crops were undocumented and the crops were starting to rot in the fields and the administration understood, at the operational level, what the policy analysts and the historians had always known: you cannot actually remove these workers without removing the food supply.
The order was reversed publicly within days to continue the performance even though the raids quietly stopped. The workers stayed. The crops got picked.
The farm pause is the single most honest thing the current administration has done on immigration. Not because they meant it to be. Because it accidentally told the truth.
Then Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. One hundred and fifty billion dollars for immigration enforcement. The most money ever allocated to border and interior enforcement in American history. An additional $45 billion specifically to build new detention centers — which GEO Group and CoreCivic are already under contract to fill, with GEO alone projecting $240 million in annual revenue from four reactivated facilities.
Zero provisions for mandatory E-Verify. Zero requirements for employer accountability. Zero criminal penalties for the businesses hiring the workers they were simultaneously spending $150 billion to deport.
One hundred and fifty billion dollars to chase the workers. Zero to prosecute the people paying them.
And the border deal. In early 2024, a bipartisan group of senators negotiated what analysts on both sides described as the most significant border security legislation in 40 years. Additional border agents. Emergency authority to restrict crossings. Tightened asylum standards. Increased court funding. Exactly what the Republican Party had claimed to want for decades.
Trump killed it. Explicitly. He called Senate Republicans and told them to vote no. It failed 49-50 and then 43-50. Because a solved border crisis is a lost campaign issue. The crisis was more valuable than the solution. The problem had to be preserved to justify the performance.
This is the full ledger. Tanton to Miller. Barbed wire around a Houston motel to 73,000 people at $152 a day. The $16 million in lobbying to the $150 billion enforcement bill. The farm pause to the zero E-Verify provisions. The 170 American citizens detained by mistake to the one employer prosecution. The 238 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador without hearings to the border deal killed to preserve the campaign.
This is not a crisis. This is a business.
And the workers — as they have been for 400 years, through every legal category and every enforcement regime and every wave of panic — are right where the system needs them to be.
Doing the work.
Because someone has to.
And the system made sure it would always be them.
What you get in the series:
When an argument begins and ends with a sarcastic question, that already tells me there isn't much of a counterargument underneath it. A country addicted to racial and economic supremacy, at odds with itself because immigration exposes the conflict.
Part 2 — The Opening Question 🔍
Would you trust someone inferior with your children, your home, your food, your nation? No. So explain to me why you did.
Part 3 — The Origin Document 📜
Slavery is not a metaphor for immigration. It is immigration policy. The first imported labor force. No wages, no citizenship, no path to permanence. And what happened when the paperwork changed but the system didn’t.
144 years. Chinese, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Central American. The same play. Different cast. The Bracero Program as America’s confession. The 11 employers prosecuted per year versus 125,000 workers. The numbers that make the argument for you.
Part 5 — The Current Theater 🎭 ← You are here
The farm raid pause that revealed everything. The $150 billion enforcement bill with zero E-Verify. The private prison stocks up 42% on election night. The border deal killed to preserve the crisis.
Part 6 — The Exhaustion 🕯️
We built this together. All of us. By every measure of history, data, and common sense. And they are putting it up for sale — for a smaller, more violent, less stable version of itself. You don’t need a crystal ball. You just need eyes. And a mind not addled by the intellectually numbing effect of believing your own mythology. This is why Black people are so tired. Not from the hatred. From the obviousness of it.
References
Southern Poverty Law Center. (2025). John Tanton: Extremist File. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/john-tanton/
Southern Poverty Law Center. (2009; updated 2019). The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance/
Lind, D. (2019). The ghosts of John Tanton. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/john-tanton-far-right-extremism-environmentalism-climate-change
Plot Against Immigrants Project. (2019). John Tanton. https://plotagainstimmigrants.com/network/john-tanton/
Burkhardt, B.C. (2024). From private prisons to private detention: Visualizing the business of immigration enforcement. Socius, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231241277106
Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). Private Prison Companies’ Enormous Windfall: Who Stands to Gain as ICE Expands. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/private-prison-companies-enormous-windfall-who-stands-gain-ice-expands
Harvard Law School Systemic Justice Project. (2022). The profitability of inhumanity: How corporate power gives rise to forced labor in privatized immigration detention. https://systemicjustice.org/article/the-profitability-of-inhumanity/
Das, B.K. (2026, February 5). ICE’s private prison contractors spent millions lobbying to force banks to give them loans. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2026/02/05/private-prison-corecivic-geo-group-ice-bank-loan/
TRAC Immigration. (2025). ICE Deportations and Enforcement Data. Syracuse University. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/
American Immigration Council. (2023). The Costs of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. (2023). Undocumented Immigrants’ State and Local Tax Contributions. https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes/
Congressional Record. (2024, February). Border Security and Immigration Reform Act — Senate votes. https://www.congress.gov
One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (2025). Public Law, 119th Congress.
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
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