Dozens of U.S. corporations have reaped massive revenue from the Donald Trump administration's hard-line immigration enforcement policies. As government agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tightened immigration crackdowns, related contract expenditure surged.
On the 29th, the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing its own analysis of U.S. government contract data, that since last January, when the second Trump administration took office, U.S. corporations including Palantir and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) have earned more than $22 billion (about 32 trillion won) through contracts with government agencies.
Palantir, a U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) data analytics corporations, has won contracts totaling $81 million (about 116.4 billion won) from ICE since last January. According to a list of AI use cases recently released by the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has used Palantir's AI since May of last year to summarize, categorize, and translate large volumes of citizen tips. Palantir, which has maintained a contractual relationship with ICE for more than 10 years, also provides an AI system that identifies clues such as the addresses of people subject to enforcement, including deportation, so agents can share them.
Consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) also secured more than $100 million (about 143.7 billion won) in new work from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) over the same period. More recently, it renewed a contract that provides more funding for the "law enforcement systems and analytics for enforcement and removal operations" institutional sector with ICE, and the contract newly included a clause for "internet investigation and data analytics support services" for ICE's targeted operations unit, FT said.
In addition, Fisher Sand & Gravel, led by Republican donor Tommy Fisher, has taken in more than $6 billion (about 9 trillion won) from CBP since last July through contracts including construction of parts of the southern U.S. border wall. The company also previously won wall-building contracts during the first Trump administration by leveraging Republican connections.
CSI Aviation, which provided charter flights to transport immigrants, is cited as the biggest beneficiary of ICE contracts. Since Trump returned to office in January, the company has won more than $1.2 billion in contracts related to immigration enforcement. CSI Aviation serves as a broker for the charter flights used to transport immigrants.
FT noted, "Many agency contracts are related to routine tasks such as modernizing IT systems or outsourcing data center staffing, and most began under the previous administration," while adding, "Some corporations are tied to new strategies the Trump administration uses to identify, arrest, and deport undocumented immigrants or induce voluntary departures."
Since the launch of the Trump administration, U.S. immigration authorities have declared a "war on undocumented immigrants" and expanded their scope of activity. In particular, after the passage last July of a fiscal stimulus bill, the so-called "one big and beautiful bill," budgets increased and immigration enforcement-related expenditure also jumped sharply. ICE's contract expenditure more than doubled to $3.7 billion (about 5 trillion won) over the two quarters following the bill's passage.
CBP's private institutional sector expenditure also surged sevenfold in the second half of last year. Notably, CBP signed nearly $2 billion (about 3 trillion won) in new contracts just this month, exceeding the total contract volume for the first half of 2025.
If corporations that provide services indirectly—without contracting directly on the grounds of immigration enforcement—with the federal government are included, the number of beneficiary corporations is likely to grow further. In September of last year, ICE signed a $24 million (about 34.5 billion won) contract with a third-party vendor that manages Amazon cloud services on its behalf, and it also paid $19 million (about 27.3 billion won) to Dell for Microsoft enterprise licenses.
However, with a string of deaths during recent immigration enforcement operations, there has been pushback among some employees at corporations working with the two agencies. About 1,000 technology industry workers, including those at Google, recently issued a statement urging corporate leadership to cancel government contracts and voice opposition to immigration enforcement policies. In addition, posts from employees demanding an explanation from leadership have reportedly been uploaded one after another to Palantir's internal collaboration platform "Slack" and its intranet "wiki."