This story is a collaboration between Mother Jones, POGO Investigates, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

William Walters is fighting to hang on to a massive government contract. Since last year, Walters’ firm—Salus Worldwide Solutions—has been running a high-profile Trump administration program that offers free flights and cash to undocumented immigrants who agree to “self-deport.” And for nearly as long, Walters’ detractors and competitors have been trying to pry this work away from his firm.

The lucrative contract—worth up to $915 million—has drawn backlash on Capitol Hill following allegations that Salus won the award through a procurement process that seemed to favor the company. In response, Walters has asserted that his company’s troubles are being ginned up by rival contractors. He has taken aim at the private prison giant GEO Group and CSI Aviation, a firm that handles non-voluntary deportation flights. Those companies, Walters argues, are working to undermine Salus’ self-deportation efforts because they will make more money if migrants remain behind bars for longer periods of time, before being forcibly deported.

“GEO Group and CSI Aviation…stand to profit the most from longer detention and custodial deportation of immigrants in chains,” Walters recently charged after Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, urged the Department of Homeland Security to cancel Salus’ contract.

So far, Walters has not provided direct evidence proving his claims that these companies have “engineered” congressional or media scrutiny of Salus, although CSI Aviation and GEO Group do lobby Congress on issues related to immigration. GEO Group and CSI Aviation did not respond to multiple requests for comment; Navigators Global, a DC lobbying firm that works with both companies, did not respond to a query.

“The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings.”

But there is little question that Salus, CSI, and GEO are fighting over portions of the Trump-era mass-deportation industry. In this growing market, people facing deportation—whether they are detained in squalid camps, forcibly flown out of the country, or agree to leave under the threat of detention—are seen as commodities.

“The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center. She noted that beyond aviation and private prison companies, firms are profiting by providing food, laundry, and varied other services to the tens of thousands of people in ICE confinement every day. “There is so much money right now in detaining people,” she said.

DHS’s self-deportation campaign has become a central pillar of the administration’s efforts to remove millions of immigrants from the country. In theory, the idea is relatively straightforward: faced with the specter of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, undocumented immigrants can choose to end their legal efforts to remain in the United States and voluntarily return to their countries of origin. Since the White House launched Project Homecoming in May of last year, the administration has used a barrage of social media posts, television appearances, and flyers in immigration courts and detention facilities to push immigrants to “leave on their own terms.”

Salus, the sole company with a federal contract to facilitate self-deportations, has taken the campaign to dozens of ICE detention centers around the country. The company’s DHS contract tasks it with supporting Project Homecoming by signing up detained people to self-deport, buying them plane tickets, processing “exit payments,” chartering flights, and delivering other services. Salus provides the “only on-site personnel dedicated to identifying and assisting with processing voluntary departure candidates,” according to a court filing.

Salus says that, compared........

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