This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Migrant Rights Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.
“I feel sometimes that we are beating on [the problem] with a wrench instead of understanding where it is vulnerable and how we can break it down more easily than we do.” -Craig Gilmore
In our previous entry in this ongoing series explaining our opposition to the deportation regime in the United States, we focused on the proposed establishment of an ICE “mega-center” for immigration detention here in Salt Lake City. Since that time, while that particular sale was cancelled, ICE has instead closed on another, comparable property within the logistics hub near Salt Lake City International Airport. It’s no accident that the infrastructure of just-in-time manufacturing, warehousing, and rapid transportation demands of late capitalism have proven an instructive model for the deportation machine. Indeed, our particular flavor of contemporary fascism1 draws heavily from its lessons. As we expose the machinery of deportation, we need to take a look at the various corporate inputs that service that machinery, and take measure of complicity with them, in order to further develop our program of opposition.
The comparison to corporate shipping logistics is not mere metaphor; indeed, ICE itself takes inspiration from these corporate behemoths in furtherance of its white supremecist vision. Speaking at the 2025 Border Security Expo, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons asserted that ICE “[needs] to get better at treating this like a business,” like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” While Lyons conceives of the use of rapid, large-scale immigrant round-ups filling vans and flights out of the country, ‘border czar’ Tom Homan expounds upon the business strategy, shedding light on the project’s incentives. At the same event, he clarified that they should “let the badge and guns do the badge-and-gun stuff. Everything else, let’s contract out.” The implications of this strategy, that is, a high degree of intentional dependence on private business to construct, maintain, and otherwise support the US deportation machine, must not be overlooked.
The dependence of DHS on private enterprise, married with its monopoly on violence, illustrates the symbiotic relationship between capital and governance. As wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the direction of the state becomes twinned, if not subservient, to the direction desired by capital: namely, defending that capital and its reserve of power. In our current moment, this means an organized and well-funded campaign to villainize and eradicate (non-white) immigrants, an essential subsection of the US working class.
The monolithic leviathan formed by that incestuous synthesis of state power and capital, however, is not invulnerable. It is comprised of an entire ecosystem of contractors, subcontractors, lobbyists, and public officials, each, at every level, fulfilling their small part in the victimization of the immigrant community. As a whole, the deportation machine is virtually unassailable. But in comparison, each individual aspect is weak. The analysis by Easterling (2014) shows how systems are typified by the ‘switches’ and ‘wiring’ that compose them, that redirect, restrict, or encourage the flow of material to suit their desired political disposition. When these systems are opaque or purposely difficult to understand, this in turn may reinforce that disposition. If we look at the network of local police, federalized immigration authorities, the administrative state, and the network of private contractors and subcontractors that support their activities, these nodes and vectors come into clear. Money moves from the public coffers into private industry via the same system that migrants are either restricted or welcomed to suit the needs of capital. At each switch and wire, each node and vector, we can illustrate another part of this system.
The contemporary, gold-standard analysis of this machinery was conducted by Hiemstra and Conlon in their work Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants (2025). Therein, the authors examine three areas of outsourcing by DHS within the corrections industry: the management of food and commissary services, management of medical care, and the regulatory ouroboros of accountability and certification. It is no surprise that the bids for these contracts that carry the day are often won by the same repeated players that are incentived—and to be frank, functionally required—to cut these services to the bone. Under the provision of ‘effective public service,’ contracting officers must award contracts to those that can provide the service as cheaply as possible.
In one example in their research, Hiemstra and Conlon were able to review bids that resulted in Aramark winning the largesse to feed the Bergen County, NJ detainees at the rate of just $1.35 per meal. In addition, the provision of bare-bones medical services create further opportunities for abuse in the name of profit; while medical services are nominally provided on-site, these services are mediated, and sometimes even provided, by security staff. While on site, medical providers are pressured and heavily incentivized to deny or reduce services. The result is a tiered system within the detention center in which precarious contract workers, under pressure to perform or lose their employment, are beholden to firms intent on scraping every last cent from ICE. What chance do migrant detainees have under such a system of receiving humane care or any semblance of justice?
Contractors for ICE also include businesses providing services beyond the scope of on-site operations as well, several of which call Utah their home. Among them are Global Miracle Solutions, a consulting and administrative services contractor; HealthEquity, a flexible spending account administrator; Management and Training Corporation, which operates five private, for-profit immigration detention facilities in California, New Mexico, and Texas; and Action Target, which designs and manufactures shooting ranges and equipment for law enforcement agencies. Which companies, both within and without Utah, that ICE ultimately contracts to support its newly purchased facility in Salt Lake City remains to be seen. Though details remain scant, so far information on at least one contract for the SLC facility has come to light: a contract with GEO Transport Inc. (a subsidiary of the international detention facility operator GEO Group) to provide ground “transportation” of detainees.
We cannot look to our governments for relief, even at the local level. In a world of diminishing public services where the budgets of cities and counties are stretched to the breaking point, the appeal of a steady, consistent addition to the public coffers is clear, and also by design. Decades of neoliberalism and the decline of the public sector have left many municipalities hollowed out and in dire need of a broader tax base. When ICE comes calling, offering to drop a thousand-bed prison into the county and all the associated jobs and infrastructure that comes with it, they are really only given the option to submit. Once that dependency is established, it is extremely rare that a governmental body will accept cutting off such a stable and lucrative flow of capital—one that, in the current moment, is poised to only expand. Even in those vanishingly rare cases where cities or counties have voted to terminate agreements with ICE to house detainees, they were then overruled by courts or state legislature to subvert that decision. Utah’s legislature, for its part, is far too eager to countermand local legislation for much smaller concerns. When their interests—and investment portfolios—are under threat, the party of small government is ready to bring the hammer down on any smaller government. ICE is too far entrenched to allow something as mere as local political power to rein in its excess.
Here, however, is where an opportunity presents itself. While ICE and its deportation machine has the political cover and the inexhaustible funds and political capital to present itself as inevitable, it is reliant on the same logistical and staffing structures that power the economy writ large, built on exploitation, precarity, and the division of the working class. Nesting dolls of subcontractors to provide deniability and anonymity are well-practiced in this field, and with each level, new nodes are presented as opportunities for pressure. To date, this has been rarely attempted; a rare exception is the successful campaign to boycott Avelo Airlines, applying sufficient public pressure to force the low-cost airline to abandon its contract flying deportees on behalf of ICE. Additionally, the public shame campaign aimed at the Ritchie Group for the attempted sale to ICE may have been a deciding factor in cancelling the first sale. While recognizing the victories in these two examples, however, it is imperative that we remain open to a diversity of tactics; while boycotts and rhetorical admonitions can be useful, sometimes more direct forms of action become necessary in order to exercise a sufficient measure of disincentivization.
Notwithstanding the tactics used to impose DHS contractors’ capitulation, we must accept as self-evident that we cannot rely on state or local governments for relief. Although state and local governments exert their power further away from the deportation machine’s center of gravity than federal agencies, each remains a component of that hegemonic leviathan formed from the synergism of state and capital. Even when individual politicians ostensibly wish to push back against ICE’s presence in the communities they represent, the conventional avenues available to them are limited. For example, unable to use the oft-relied-upon lever of updating zoning ordinances, due to federal preemption of state and local law, SLC’s politicians are left grasping at straws, like their ineffectual decision to place new water limits on the SLC facility. Despite Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s pledge to “use every tool at the City’s disposal to stop” the ICE facility, Salt Lake City Police have acted to protect the facility and ICE officers. Given the Mayor’s role in appointing SLCPD’s police chief and her power to remove them, a sincere expression of her opposition would entail demanding that SLCPD provide ICE with no protection or assistance. If, as the Supreme Court has determined, police have no obligation to protect ordinary people, why should they attend to the protection of DHS’s property and its federal agents terrorizing our communities?
Mendenhall’s ineffective and cynical “opposition” to ICE’s encroachment into Salt Lake City puts on display one instance of a larger pattern: politicians are unwilling to opt for unconventional tactics that could bring uncomfortable legal challenges or risk damaging their political credibility. They will not do what is necessary to resist the abuses of the federal immigration enforcement system.
We must internalize the fact of our central position in the struggle to compel the retrenchment of the deportation machine. Any victories seemingly found in the actions of politicians are in reality attributable to the pressure we exert against them. So we’re confronted with a question: What tactics are available to us to further actualize that retrenchment, and ultimately, ICE’s abolition?
If, as stated by Neel (2018), “[t]he true center of the world economy is not to be found in the ‘creative,’ financialized, or high-tech downtown cores of its global cities, but instead in the complex mesh of material infrastructure that links them together,” then our analysis and tactics must change accordingly. And if, as we have established, ICE depends on the same systems, practices, and structures of power that enable your Amazon Prime delivery, then opportunities to gain leverage present themselves. There is a soft underbelly waiting to be punctured. Or, to picture the structure more accurately: nodes that recapture money and migrants, and the vectors by which capital benefits in directing and restricting flow, any of which can be a target for action.
In usual fashion, we can find one such tactical opportunity in the plight of workers. Globalized shipping and logistics companies are built on a foundation of exploitation, which is seen primarily in their working conditions—from the original site of production; to factory refinement; to shipping, loading, and warehousing; down to the last mile of delivery. As Chua writes (2026), the workers in this broad industry are in a uniquely precarious position due to any number of marginalizing factors including barriers to education, immigration status, racism and geography. “Often they work multiple jobs with unpredictable shifts. Whatever the supply chain demands. Precarity and underemployment are not mere byproducts of industrial blight; they are intentional strategies that bear the imprint of urban racism.” It is here that ICE hopes to staff and power their international deportation machine. These are the potential points of agitation for the workers that provide the labor necessary for federal immigration enforcement.
As this deportation machine continues to try to crystallize, to make its presence more fixed and permanent in our society, we will continue to analyze its shape, structure and motion. We will fight it every step of the way, and as we do so, we will learn exactly what we are grappling with, and we will remember that this fight is ongoing in a global context—our allies are not merely the comrades and neighbors here in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, but also those hammering at any node of the deportation machine, striking at any vector. We are doing ourselves no favors if we struggle as one, without linking to broader struggles against borders, logistical exploitation networks, and the capital class that uses the connectivity of markets and societies to shift blame, costs, and consequences. Solidarity, from down the street to across the oceans, is the only way out. We will build it block by block until we have broken this machine.
Footnotes
1 Too often, the discussion of “is this fascism?” devolves into a discussion of how and whether and to what degree something compares to Italian or German or Spanish or whatever derivative fascism. These are beside the point. The synthesis of state and corporate power threatens us all while we quibble over the trappings, and to quote George Jackson, “[t]he final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” Let’s spend our time organizing and refining ourselves instead of spending time trying to hit a moving target.
Works Cited
Chua, C. “The Warehouse, in Plain Sight,” Places Journal, April 2026. Accessed 19 Apr 2026. <https://placesjournal.org/article/the-warehouse-in-plain-sight-a-disappearing-machine/>
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. United Kingdom: Verso.
Graziosi, G. (2025, April 9). ICE chief thinks deportation system should be run like Amazon Prime ‘but with human beings.’ The Independent. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-deportations-amazon-p rime-b2730464.html>
Hoque, U., Hunter, D., & Britney. (2026, January 14). Here’s how we pressured an airline to end its contract with ICE. Truthout. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from
https://truthout.org/articles/heres-how-we-pressured-an-airline-to-end-its-contract-with-ice/ Jackson, G. (1972). Blood in My Eye. United Kingdom: Random House.
Hiemstra, N., Conlon, D. (2025). Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants. United Kingdom: Pluto Press.
Jones, A., Thornblad, J., & Aerts, L. (2026, January 24). Owners and investors of warehouse rumored to be used as ICE facility say they have ‘no plans to sell’ to the federal government. abc4.com. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from
<https://www.abc4.com/news/wasatch-front/owners-of-warehouse-rumored-to-be-used-as-ice -facility-say-they-have-no-plans-to-sell/>
Neel, P. A. (2018). Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. United Kingdom: Reaktion Books.
Semerad, T. (2023a, March 4). Moab, Park City cry foul as Utah lawmakers target rules for vacation homes. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from <https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/03/03/moab-park-city-cry-foul-utah/>
Stern, E. (2025, June 26). As Utah sees immigration raid protests, 4 local companies make money from ICE — and one is lobbying for more. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from
<https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/06/26/these-utah-companies-profit-off/>
