As For-Profit Companies Battle Over ICE Contracts, Immigrants Are Caught in the Middle

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. 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 to the harsh realities of prolonged ICE detention, its self-deportation program offers a “more humane and dignified approach to the departure of illegal aliens.” Yet some critics, including attorneys for migrants who have been approached by the company’s representatives, say the choice being offered to detainees can be coercive. According to Emilie Raber, a senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, conditions in ICE facilities are one of the most significant factors detainees tend to weigh when deciding whether to continue pursuing their immigration cases in court or voluntarily leave the country. Those conditions can be dismal, even deadly; fatalities in ICE facilities this year are on track to exceed the number of deaths in 2004, the highest number in a year to date. The administration has often touted harsh detention as a feature, not a bug, notably in the case of Florida’s now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz.” The implicit threat is hard to miss. “Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE warned migrants in a social media post last September. “AVOID THE JAIL CELL. AVOID THE HUMILIATION.” Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last year launched a $220 million ad campaign touting that message with images of cuffed detainees being forcibly placed on planes. Salus’ self-deportation operations stretch far and wide. A review of job postings shows the company and its subcontractor, BDR Strategic Services, have been hiring “facility enrollment managers” and “detainee support officers” near detention centers across the country. In a December court filing, Salus said it had dispatched two-person “enrollment management teams” to facilities to recruit migrants for the program. As of early July, its employees have entered at least 50 facilities across the country, according to a document that Walters shared. The company claims it has facilitated nearly 80,000 self-deportations. In mid-April, a Salus employee approached a Central American immigrant with a set of self-deportation papers in a Louisiana ICE detention facility, according to Raber and Amelia Dagen, who represent the detainee. The attorneys declined to name the client over concerns for his privacy and because his case is sensitive. In an email to Raber, an assistant US attorney confirmed Salus’ involvement. According to Raber, Salus was pitching its program to many detainees in the facility as a way to leave detention. The papers weren’t in her client’s native Spanish, but the client understood that Salus was offering “voluntary departure.” Raber said her client had a preexisting medical issue, which went untreated while he was detained. (We could not independently verify the detainee’s medical condition, but inadequate health care is common in ICE detention facilities.) Still, the client declined to sign the papers. A Salus spokesperson said the company did not have enough information to comment on this specific case but added in an email that “while DHS-specific forms are in English, forms specific to Project Homecoming are presented in English and Spanish.” The company spokesperson also said all eligibility decisions are ultimately the government’s: “Salus does not determine eligibility for or authorize voluntary departure. Those decisions are made exclusively by DHS.” Voluntary departures existed before Trump reentered office, but the administration’s self-deportation push has drawn concerns from some immigration attorneys who say that, in practice, it does not appear to have the same procedural guardrails as before. Dagen says it’s unclear whether self-deportation, as it now exists, always enables detainees to exercise their right to an attorney or holds ICE to the benefits, like exit payments and legal relief, that the government is promising them. “If self-deportation is asking people to give up their opportunity to go to court,” Dagen cautions, “they are also giving up the right to hear their rights and then pursue them.” “Given that detention is inherently coercive, the best way for an individual to make an informed decision is by getting a chance to speak to an immigration attorney about the details of their specific case,” adds Whitlock of the National Immigration Law Center. “It is highly unlikely that a private government contractor, who isn’t an attorney, is acting in the best interest of someone in detention.” In response to questions, a DHS spokesperson asserted that ICE gives all detainees a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys and access to law libraries, translation services, and phones to contact their lawyers. But attorneys for detainees have said their clients don’t always receive sufficient access to counsel while in detention. In a January court declaration, for example, one Minnesota-based attorney recounted spending many hours calling the ICE field officer number they’d been instructed to use to locate and get access to their clients. Only once did someone pick up, according to the declaration. Salus’ contract quickly ran into controversy. Walters, critics noted, has cultivated MAGA ties, including an October 2024 donation to a PAC linked to Noem, who was DHS secretary when the contract was awarded. As Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported, CSI Aviation last year sued DHS in an attempt to nullify the contract, arguing that the department had conducted a “sham” competition to award this work to Salus. CSI claimed DHS actions blocked it from competing and improperly benefited Salus. The suit turned up a government acknowledgement that, prior to awarding the contract, DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public.” According to a government court filing, a DHS official at one point observed that the department’s actions “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.” (That official ultimately concluded the department had taken sufficient steps to mitigate the problems.) In May 2026, a judge ruled against CSI after finding CSI hadn’t shown it could have performed the work. The judge also wrote that he was “confident” DHS’s actions were proper, “at least based on the administrative record before this Court.” Still, the deal faced skepticism from congressional Democrats and even some Trump administration officials. In July, DHS announced plans for a new competition to replace the contract Salus currently holds. Walters and the web of companies linked to him have faced other controversy. Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported in March on the role of Walters-connected firms in procuring luxury jets and other planes for DHS. That includes the now-infamous “Big, Beautiful Jet” that Noem and her top aide, Corey Lewandowski, flew on. The jet became a focal point of criticism of Noem during congressional hearings in March that precipitated her firing. Salus has blamed the scrutiny in part on its corporate rivals. In a letter to Congress in April, Walters noted that these competitors control a far larger portion of the deportation industry than Salus does, and he argued that their dominance is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and increasing the amount of time immigrants spend in detention. “Between 2022 and 2025, four of those companies that have built their business around private detention centers and forced deportation flights, have received more than $7 billion in contract awards which is more than the next 43 ICE contractors combined,” he wrote. According to Walters, Salus’ work facilitating self-deportations since May 2025 “has saved DHS more than $2 billion over forced deportation.” This, he said, was a direct threat to the bottom line of companies like GEO and CSI that “take a less humane approach.” For its part, GEO Group has consistently denied that it lobbies to increase the time that detainees spend in its facilities. “We do not take a position on nor have we ever advocated for or against criminal justice or immigration policies such as whether to criminalize behavior, the length of criminal sentences, or the basis for or length of an individual’s incarceration or detention,” the company says on its website. In his letter to lawmakers, Walters also took aim at a March 19 NBC News story that cited an anonymous source who alleged that Salus had pressured an unidentified “marketing firm” seeking a subcontract to partner with a company linked to Lewandowski. That story had prompted Rep. Robert Garcia, the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, to ask Walters if Lewandowski or anyone tied to Lewandowski had ever solicited anything of value from Salus in exchange for favorable treatment, or if Salus had offered or delivered anything of value to Lewandowski. Lewandowski and Salus have denied doing so. Responding to the lawmakers, Walters implied that his rivals were behind negative stories about his company. “When those competitors could not win in a fair contract competition that they were not qualified for, and when DHS had the temerity to push back against their bid protest in federal court, they turned to lobbyists and unethical ‘reporters’ to mislead you and accuse us of crimes as implausible as they are outrageous,” Walters wrote. (Salus has not alleged that any reporting by Mother Jones and POGO is inaccurate.) Walters also provided lawmakers emails that Salus’ lawyer David Panzer sent to an NBC reporter prior to the NBC story’s publication, including one calling the claims the reporter asked about “entirely false.” “Salus has concerns that you may be being fed false information,” Panzer wrote to the reporter on March 16. After the story ran, Panzer wrote to NBC’s general counsel, demanding the network retract its reporting and threatening a lawsuit. Days later, NBC updated its story with additional comments from Salus. NBC News did not respond to a request for comment. Among the reasons Walters bristles at accusations that his company has benefited from government favoritism is that, in his view, the system is actually rigged against him. GEO and CSI Aviation have extensive ties to the administration. ICE’s new acting director is former GEO Group executive David Venturella. White House Border Czar Tom Homan formerly worked as a GEO consultant. CSI CEO Allen Weh hosted a campaign rally for Trump days before the 2024 election. “The record shows the same recurring pattern,” Salus argued in a document attached to Walters’ letter to Congress, “the repeated use of sole-source, limited source, follow-on bridge contracts, solicitations with one offeror, or other materially noncompetitive vehicles” that benefit CSI and other Salus competitors. One of those no-bid “interim” contracts has been singled out for criticism in a new class-action lawsuit against CSI and its subcontractor GlobalX brought by Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The lawsuit notes that CSI and ICE agreed to modify their contract the day before the rendition planes took off. The no-bid contract and the modification, the suit says, “were plainly aimed at implementing the U.S.–El Salvador agreement to render Venezuelan migrants to CECOT.” Neither company responded to a request for comment on the suit. But for all the bad blood and legal brawling, Salus’ self-deportation business seems to benefit from his rivals’ harsh detention and deportation tactics. In an email, a DHS spokesperson disputed the notion that the arrangement was coercive, declaring it “categorically false [that] we would pressure someone to self-deport.” But in the same email, the spokesperson wrote that “being in detention is a choice,” adding, “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App.” The spokesperson wrote that immigrants should “take advantage” of the $2,600 and free flights. “If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.” And the public messaging campaign continues. In a July 23 press release, DHS claimed it had imposed $84 billion in fines on “illegal aliens who refuse to leave the United States.” “Our message to illegal aliens is clear,” a department official said in the release. “LEAVE NOW. If you don’t you will face the consequences, including fines, arrest, and deportation.”