Microsoft, however, is not alone in corporate America when it comes to enabling ICE and Customs and Border Protection operations. In fact, corporations like Accenture, Boeing, Elbit, G4S, General Dynamics, IBM, L3 Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir (with software provided by Amazon), Raytheon, and UNISYS are among the hundreds of companies who are facilitating the migrant detention and deportation machine—and have been raking in, from 2006 to 2018, more than a combined $45 billion, dispersed among nearly 100,000 separate contracts with CBP and ICE. Besides being an enormous expenditure of taxpayer dollars, this sum also represents an unprecedented and ever-increasing reliance on for-profit companies in carrying out the government’s immigration crackdown.
Immigration enforcement budgets have ballooned from $350 million in 1980, to $1.2 billion in 1990, to $9.1 billion in 2003, to a whopping $23.7 billion in 2018, all going into what has become our border industrial complex. Those budgets then annually funnel $2.32 billion back to the private sector through federal immigration, corrections, and detention contracts.