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In May, former GEO Group executive David Venturella became the acting director of ICE. Venturella’s ascent marked the latest victory for GEO Group, a behemoth in the world of private prisons and detention centers, which saw its annual profit rise nearly eightfold during the first year of Trump’s second term. After years of weaving its profit-making machinery into the fabric of the prison industrial complex — with ICE as its largest customer — Venturella’s appointment signals an unabashed merger between GEO Group and the US deportation machine: an arrangement that positions GEO Group to extract ever greater profits as detainees are funneled into its detention centers, shackled with its electronic monitors, and warehoused in facilities it owns, manages, or helps operate.

If this sounds like it should be illegal, it almost is. New government employees are typically barred for one year from working on contracts that would benefit their former employers — an already inadequate buffer that was waived for Venturella, who worked for ICE for 22 years before working at GEO Group in various capacities for over a decade, and who reportedly continued as a paid GEO consultant until less than two weeks before returning to ICE. As Elizabeth Warren highlighted in an open letter to Venturella on May 27, the new acting director’s appointment also comes amid reports that he used DHS personnel and resources “for personal or political favors.” A cartoon caricature of revolving door politics, Venturella’s appointment reeks of corruption, but it hardly feels out of place on the current landscape.

While corruption is neither exceptional nor unheard of in the U.S., Trumpism has ushered in an era of corruption and consolidation as governance. The rules, practices, and processes that have ordered our lives are being collapsed into an ongoing heist, as billionaires and corporations dismantle systems that benefit the public, supercharge systems of surveillance and control, and extract as much wealth and as many resources as they can in the process. Henry Giroux recently described this phenomenon as “the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal.”

Giroux argues that by treating corruption as a “staging ground,” the Trump administration is reorganizing public life around “values of self-interest, commodification, hyper-individualism, and ruthless competition.”

This reorganization is realized in Trump’s pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and other dubiously chosen individuals, and in his naked avarice — turning the presidency into a massive conduit for personal profit. By creating spectacles of cruelty and reveling in a white supremacist, Christian nationalist hierarchy of supremacy, Trump celebrates the violence of bordering, the violence of exclusion, and annihilatory politics as natural and necessary. A circus of redemptive violence entertains his aggrieved, cultish following while billionaire gangsters carve up the world, gutting life-sustaining structures and services as they seize water and land, and further monetize the isolation, surveillance, and containment of human beings — including those who believe they benefit from the current order.

A Movement Is Growing to Close the Largest ICE Jail on the East Coast

This model of corruption as governance, and oligarchic mass extraction, is also visible in other appointments that mirror Venturella’s. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was infamously recorded accepting a bag containing $50,000 from undercover FBI agents during a 2024 corruption sting, after allegedly promising to help secure immigration-related contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has also worked as a paid consultant for GEO Group.

Homan’s office reportedly played a role in Venturella’s appointment.

Tom Schultz, a former timber industry executive, now heads the U.S. Forest Service. Schultz is the first Forest Service chief with no prior experience inside the agency. Under his leadership, experienced staffers have been pushed out or pushed to leave, regional offices and research facilities are being shuttered or consolidated, and the administration has advanced policies that allow for expanded logging and less environmental review. As Jim Pattiz........

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