Trump Just Handed Mass Detention Policy to a Private Prison Executive
Plus: The new DHS chief starts the way Noem ended—by losing.
THE NEW HEAD of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be David Venturella, a former executive of the GEO Group, which I think of as the Coca-Cola of immigrant detention—the ubiquitous, hugely profitable, default option wherever you go. (That would make CoreCivic, America’s second-largest provider, the Pepsi of private prisons.)
Trump’s appointment of a veteran of the prison-industrial complex is a shocking display of how intertwined private industry and government bureaucracy have become over the last sixteen months. It also shines a light on the state of the Department of Homeland Security and hints at the authority (or lack thereof) of its new leader, Markwayne Mullin.
But first, let’s chat about Venturella.
This isn’t one of those things where, as part of a long career, Venturella held an executive post a dozen years ago.
No. From 2012 to 2023, Venturella was a senior vice president of a company that holds $1 billion in ICE contracts. According to the SEC, even after retiring from the GEO Group, Venturella continued to advise on new and existing contracts, serving as a paid consultant until January 2025. What ever could have happened in January 2025 that led Venturella to give up this gig?
And, how unusual is this?
Well, ethics rules bar federal employees from working on contracts awarded to their former employers. But the Washington Post reports the Trump administration conveniently granted Venturella a waiver. Within two weeks of leaving his consulting role at GEO Group, Venturella joined ICE as a senior adviser. At the time, ICE reassured the press that Venturella would have “no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts.” If that state of affairs was ever true, it’s over now.
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a staunch critic of ICE and of Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, said that only a few years ago it would have been “unimaginable” for a former private prison executive to oversee the awarding of contracts to his former employer.
“Private detention centers that contract with ICE will now run ICE. That’s probably the easiest way to explain it,” Ramirez told me. “This administration is trying to push and push and push and see how far they can go. And what they’ve proven is they can go pretty damn far. You’re talking about a private prison company profiting off of the pain of immigrants now having their employee be the new head of ICE.”
Ramirez added that Venturella’s appointment tells Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration donors—like GEO Group and CoreCivic—they have the green light to maximize their profits, minimize expenses, and worsen conditions at detention centers because, at the end of the day, their people are now calling the shots on contracts.
Readers who have seen the vast corruption of the Trump administration may resign themselves to thinking this is all unsurprising. After all, elections have consequences. The New York Times reported Venturella favors quieter immigration enforcement than the carnival of horrors Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and little angry Greg Bovino brought to town. But here’s one story about him worth telling.
Last summer, Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent and longtime Trump friend (who actually introduced him to Melania), needed a favor. In order to win custody of his son, Zampolli wanted his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, in jail for fraud charges, to be deported. No biggie. Zampolli reached out to the Trump administration, and an ICE official scrambled to get it done. The official called the Miami ICE field office telling them it was important to someone close to Trump.
That ICE official serving as Trump’s hatchet man that day was David Venturella.
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Homan Up, Mullin Down
A private-prison insider taking over ICE is further evidence that in the second, more brutal, Trump administration, the mass detention and deportation machine will continue to hum.
Still, it’s worth taking a step back to see where the agency finds itself now. With Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino out, Border Patrol agents are no longer making headlines for spraying constitutional observers and protesters with chemical agents. The steady stream of corruption allegations that dogged the agency under Noem has slowed—for now.
“Dozens of civilians I still talk to—they’re thankful that the Kristi Noem, Chief Bovino, Corey Lewandowski vein of activity is going to be investigated and reviewed because of how harmful it was to carrying out the mission,” said Jason Houser, who served in the Biden administration as chief of staff at ICE.
Following the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, DHS had already drawn back from its indiscipline and violence amid invasions of (blue) American cities—before Markwayne Mullin’s installation as DHS chief. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin laid out the new goal: Get ICE out of the headlines.
“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”
He sang a similar tune on Fox Business last week. “We’re not going into New York like another Minneapolis,” he said. “We’re going to go after the felons.”
That approach, while jibing with Republican leaders’ strategy of quietening down about “mass deportations” because of the policy’s abysmal poll numbers, runs afoul of Trump’s feverish base that wants millions of deportations, skulls cracked—U.S. citizen, visa holder, or not—and legal immigration severely cut (with certain exceptions, of course).
But while Mullin is in the hot seat, it is in fact Tom Homan, the border czar known for Cava lunches and cartoon bags of cash, who has been empowered in the post-Noem era. To those alleging that President Trump is getting weak on mass deportation, Homan bellowed: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
In conversations I had with former DHS officials who served in both the Biden and Trump administrations and remain in contact with their old colleagues, it became clear that employees who believe in secure borders and interior enforcement are worried about how that mission squares with election-year politics.
“There is nervousness about the fact Congress is giving them hundreds of millions to carry out a mission that is now being pulled back a bit, of mass arrests and mass detentions,” Houser told me, echoing others I spoke to.
One thing Mullin had taken a keen interest in, though, was the appointment of the new head of ICE.
Instead of Venturella, Mullin had “weighed in pretty heavily” in favor of a different candidate, a former DHS official told me. Mullin particularly liked Vic Regalado, the controversial sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. Regalado had no experience in federal immigration enforcement, but he has posed for pictures with Eric Trump and cast doubt on the 2020 election results. He also spoke at a “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible College in Oklahoma, which, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a ritual mask-burning ceremony. Because of course it did.
The Daily Beast’s PunchUp Substack also called Regalado “Mullin’s favorite.” But while the Daily Mail wrote last week that others had “big dogs” in the fight, Mullin had only a “chihuahua.”
Homan liked Venturella.
Peter Mina, a civil rights lawyer who spent a career working at DHS and ICE including a stint in the second Trump administration, said Regalado would have been a “ridiculous” pick and a “lightning rod.”
Let’s unpack this. Mullin wanted someone from outside DHS and outside ICE. It seems likely he also wanted someone from his home state—which he represented in the Senate before becoming secretary of homeland security—to be his guy at the department’s most prominent agency. Regalado fit those criteria, and he had some additional political advantages: As a Latino, he could have helped the administration defend against charges that ICE engages in racially discriminatory practices. As a wackjob, he would have driven the president’s critics nuts—which in this administration counts as a policy win. But his lack of experience would have ultimately made his appointment inadvisable. The last thing the administration needs right now is inexperience at DHS causing more bad news stories. (Well, maybe second only to revelations of more connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.)
Maybe Homan and the powers that back him—especially Stephen Miller—still had fresh memories of a different DHS head with too much power causing them problems with her lack of experience and poor decision-making. So the first time Mullin wanted to put his stamp on the agency, they overruled him.
But as it is with the Trump administration, one near terrible pick gives way to an insidious one. As Rep. Ramirez told me, people should be outraged.
“The intentionality is to normalize the corruption and therefore normalize the pain,” she continued. “The idea you would have the very same people that are getting maximum contracts now controlling the contracting process—if that is not just the ultimate level of corruption, I don’t know what is.”
"You’re talking about a private prison company profiting off of the pain of immigrants now having their employee be the new head of ICE.”
In the grand tradition of the German industrialists who built the gas chambers. And just like the Nazi party, Republicans say that Jesus wants us to do this.
Two enduring ironies of the immigration/deportation misery: (1) the Congress (now it's the 'congress') has for more than three decades failed to introduce sensible, functional immigration procedures; and (2) with the demographic realities of the United States, based on birth/death rates and an irreversibly aging population, we need immigrants, urgently.
Never forget, the nation is based on the immigration of millions from scores of countries. The 'melting pot' is historical reality, whether we like it or not.