Cages, Contracts, and a Congresswoman on Trial.
A private-prison boom, a record death toll, a Congresswoman facing 17 years in prison for trying to look inside — and a president whose donors are the ones building the cages. This is what happens when the state hands human beings to shareholders and calls it enforcement.
On May 9, 2025, Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey walked up to Delaney Hall — a GEO Group-run ICE facility in her own congressional district in Newark — with two of her colleagues, Reps. Rob Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman. They were exercising a right explicitly written into the fiscal-year 2024 appropriations bill: the authority of a member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight inspection of an immigration detention facility. What happened next has become the most consequential test of congressional oversight in a generation.
According to McIver’s account and the subsequent litigation record, the lawmakers were made to wait. Federal agents delayed the inspection until supervisors arrived from a nearby field office. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka — who had joined them — was arrested outside the gate. In the scuffle that followed, ICE agents accused McIver of shoving them. Baraka’s trespass charge was quickly dropped. McIver’s was not. Instead, then-interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba brought a three-count indictment against her, carrying a maximum sentence of up to seventeen years in federal prison.
On August 26, 2026, a divided panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals refused to dismiss those charges. Judge Thomas Ambro, in dissent, wrote that potentially retaliatory prosecutions of sitting members of Congress put the constitutional foundation of the government at risk. He is not being hyperbolic. What is on trial in Newark is not one member of Congress. What is on trial is whether the executive branch may lock the doors of its detention centers, prosecute the legislators who try to open them, and run the largest privatized human-caging operation in the democratic world without a single set of eyes it does not control.
“ICE wants to operate in the dark, and this president wants to let them.”
— Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.)
I. The Industrial Machine
The scale of what McIver was trying to see is now staggering. By January 2026, the federal government was holding a record 71,000 people in immigration detention, with the Trump administration openly targeting a population of 100,000 in custody at a time. And the human cost has scaled with the numbers. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, in a joint investigation covering the first 500 days of the second Trump term, documented 52 deaths in ICE custody. KFF, analyzing federal reporting, found that deaths rose from 11 in 2024 to 33 in 2025 — the deadliest year in ICE custody in over two decades.
These are not statistical accidents. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s office, after a monthslong investigation, released a report in January 2026 documenting more than 1,000 credible reports of human rights abuses inside U.S. immigration detention. A pregnant woman was told to “just drink water” instead of receiving a checkup. A newly postpartum detainee said she could not shower for weeks because guards required her to hold her baby at all times. A detainee who drank tap water contaminated with high levels of chlorine was reportedly denied medical care for over seven hours as his throat and nasal passages burned. Ossoff’s team confirmed 38 in-custody deaths in that same period.
People who died in ICE detention in the first 500 days of Trump’s second term, according to Human Rights Watch. 2025 was the deadliest year in the system in over 20 years.
People held in immigration detention as of January 2026 — a nearly 70 percent increase over pre-Trump levels, per Physicians for Human Rights.
Credible allegations of human rights abuses documented by Sen. Jon Ossoff’s staff between Jan. 2025 and Jan. 2026 — from pregnant women denied care to sexual assault. Read the report.
Share of ICE detainees held in facilities owned or operated by private, for-profit companies as of 2023 — a figure that has only grown, per the Brennan Center for Justice.
Nowhere is the cruelty more visible than at the makeshift tent camp in the Florida Everglades that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the White House have gleefully dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Amnesty International, after a research trip in September 2025, concluded that conditions there — overflowing toilets seeping fecal matter into sleeping areas, 24-hour lighting, insect infestation, spoiled food, and a solitary-confinement device detainees call “the box” — amount to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. In the group’s assessment, some practices at Alligator Alcatraz and the nearby Krome facility rise to the level of torture. One Cuban musician detained there told CBS News reporters that detainees were being treated like caged animals.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, granted limited access to the site after Democratic lawmakers sued for entry, described what she saw as detainees packed 32 to a cage, wall to wall. Sens. Ossoff and Dick Durbin have opened a formal inquiry into “the box.” The state of Florida issued 34 no-bid contracts totaling more than $360 million to stand the site up in a matter of weeks.
II. Who Profits
The engine that runs this system is not moral. It is financial. And it is unusually candid about it. On the same February 2026 earnings call in which GEO Group announced a $254 million annual profit — a roughly 700 percent jump over 2024 — founder and executive chairman George Zoley told investors that 2025 had been the most successful year for new business wins in the company’s history. CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger, at his own earnings call, told investors his company’s business was “perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment.” By August 2026, the two largest private-prison companies were reporting a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue. On top of that, CoreCivic booked $1.6 billion in proceeds from selling four of its facilities to the Department of Homeland Security — at an eye-watering rate of roughly $307,000 per detention bed.
The relationship runs in both directions. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported this summer, President Trump has made 29 private-prison stock trades since taking office — including seven GEO Group and CoreCivic purchases in the very same month that both CEOs told investors Trump’s policies would drive unprecedented growth. GEO Group’s holdings alone now exceed $2 billion in active ICE contracts, or roughly half its total revenue. A GEO Group subsidiary donated $1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC. CoreCivic and its CEO gave over $816,000 to the president’s campaign and inaugural committee.
The people running the machine used to run the corporations. Border czar Tom Homan disclosed in his February 2025 ethics filing that he had spent the two years before joining the administration as a paid consultant for GEO Group. Homan then helped hire David Venturella — a twelve-year GEO Group executive, paid more than $6 million during his time at the company — first as a senior DHS adviser, then, by June 2026, as the acting director of ICE. Venturella now oversees the very contracts his former employer holds. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in a public letter, asked Venturella whether he would recuse himself from any matter that could benefit GEO Group. He was granted a federal ethics waiver.
“When GEO comes in for a meeting, it feels like a fraternity reunion.”
— Scott Shuchart, Former ICE Assistant Director, to NPR
This is not a policy debate. This is a business model. And it is one that a former assistant director of ICE, Scott Shuchart, has now openly compared to a fraternity reunion when the industry meets its regulators. Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center calls it what it is: a multibillion-dollar network of public and private interests that profits from the caging of human beings.
III. A Timeline of Erosion
IV. Constitutional Wreckage
The legal architecture required to sustain a system this large — while shielding it from the sunlight of oversight — cannot survive contact with the Constitution. In May 2025, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters at the White House driveway that the administration was “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus to accelerate deportations. He argued the country was under an “invasion.” Habeas corpus — the right of any person, citizen or not, to demand that the government justify holding them — has been suspended in this country only four times: during the Civil War, during Reconstruction against the Klan, during a rebellion in the American-occupied Philippines, and after Pearl Harbor. Miller’s proposal was reportedly killed only when the administration’s own staff secretary, Will Scharf, explained that Article I of the Constitution vests the power in Congress, not the president.
The administration’s contempt for oversight has also produced a wave of federal litigation. Twelve House Democrats — led by Assistant Democratic Leader Joe Neguse and including Reps. Adriano Espaillat, Bennie Thompson, Jamie Raskin, Robert Garcia, Jason Crow, Veronica Escobar, Dan Goldman, Jimmy Gomez, and others — sued Noem and DHS to block the seven-day-notice policy. In March 2026, a federal district court in D.C. issued a preliminary injunction against it. On May 8, 2026, the D.C. Circuit refused the administration’s request for an emergency stay, keeping the injunction in place. Democracy Forward, which is litigating the case, has documented the pattern of obstruction: members of Congress permitted into a federal building, then physically blocked from the detention areas or from speaking with detainees.
Internationally, the picture is no better. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has issued findings of “grave human rights violations” tied to U.S. immigration enforcement. The UN’s own special rapporteur on judicial independence, Prof. Margaret Satterthwaite, has warned that the administration’s firing of immigration judges and its assembly-line hearings amount to a politically motivated capture of what should be independent adjudication. Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch conclude in their joint report that the pattern of deaths implicates the United States’ obligations under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — the right to life — and the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Mandela Rules. In April 2026, a coalition of fourteen human-rights organizations submitted a report to the UN human-rights review after the Trump administration refused to appear.
None of this reaches the American constitutional bedrock the administration is actively excavating. The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applies, as every serious constitutional scholar acknowledges, to all persons within the United States — not only to citizens. The Sixth Amendment’s speedy-trial protections do not evaporate at an ICE checkpoint. The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment does not stop at a tent camp in the Everglades. The Speech or Debate Clause of Article I was written into the founding document precisely so that a president could not prosecute a legislator into silence for asking uncomfortable questions of his branch of government. The prosecution of Rep. McIver runs headlong into that clause.
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V. Congress Fights, Then Funds
The Democratic caucus has not been quiet. Rep. McIver herself introduced the No Delay for Immigration Oversight Act in May 2026, which would penalize private contractors who obstruct congressional inspections. In August 2026, Reps. Summer Lee, Chris Deluzio, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, and Dwight Evans introduced the Oversight Access Act of 2026, allowing members to bring one staff member — often a translator — inside ICE facilities during an unannounced visit. Reps. Dave Min and Ayanna Pressley introduced the DHS Use of Force Transparency Act in March 2026, requiring the department to hand over all body-camera and incident-report evidence tied to injuries or deaths in custody. Rep. Jason Crow, along with the Colorado delegation and Sen. Michael Bennet, has introduced three separate DHS-reform bills — including a ban on immigration arrests at hospitals and schools, and a codification of the right to unannounced oversight.
What has passed is not those bills. What passed, in June 2026, was a Republican reconciliation package Trump signed into law that gave ICE roughly $70 billion for immigration enforcement — funding that keeps the agency financed through the end of Trump’s term with, as Democrats warned, essentially no meaningful oversight strings attached. Congressional Republicans stripped out amendments that would have provided body cameras, mandated de-escalation training, or codified inspection rights. Not a single serious GOP oversight bill has moved. On the contrary: House Republicans have moved to censure Rep. McIver and push her off the Homeland Security Committee for the offense of trying to inspect a facility in her own district.
This is what the phrase “coequal branch of government” has been reduced to. One party is writing legislation to try to see inside the cages. The other is writing checks to build more.
The 25th Amendment, the President’s Fitness, and the Fitness of a State That Cages People for Profit
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides two paths for removing a president who is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. Section 4 permits the vice president, together with a majority of the Cabinet, to transmit a written declaration to Congress that the president is unable to serve. If the president disputes it, both houses of Congress must sustain the finding by a two-thirds vote. It has never been successfully invoked.
The case for invoking it now is not speculative. On April 10, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to the White House physician demanding an immediate cognitive and neurological evaluation of the president. On April 14, Raskin introduced legislation, with 50 Democratic cosponsors, to establish a bipartisan Commission on Presidential Capacity. On April 30, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed entered into the Congressional Record a statement from 36 physicians — neurologists, psychiatrists, and specialists from Harvard, Tufts, Columbia, and George Washington — warning of the president’s “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline” and urging invocation of the amendment. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi has publicly called on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to act. Reps. Eric Swalwell, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, and Yassamin Ansari have joined the demand. Sen. Ed Markey has said the words out loud on the Senate floor.
The immigration record deepens the constitutional case rather than diverting from it. A president who purchases the stock of the corporations his executive branch is fattening with contracts is not a president discharging his duties faithfully — he is a shareholder overseeing his portfolio. A president whose deputy chief of staff proposes suspending habeas corpus — an act only Congress can perform, and only in cases of rebellion or invasion — has staffed his White House with advisers who do not believe the Constitution binds him. A president who lets his DHS obstruct sitting members of Congress and then prosecute them for trying to do their jobs is behaving as an autocrat, not an executive. And a president who presides, without observable concern, over the deadliest year in the history of U.S. immigration detention while his ICE director is a former executive of the largest private contractor is not merely negligent. He is unfit.
The Practical Barrier
The barrier is not constitutional. It is political. Section 4 requires Vice President Vance and a majority of the Cabinet to act, and Trump has staffed both with loyalists. It further requires supermajorities in both chambers of a Republican-controlled Congress. As one commentator put it, no one in Trump’s inner circle is likely to speak truth to power. The Raskin commission bill is unlikely to pass. This will surprise no one.
Why the Barrier Does Not Extinguish the Case
The 25th Amendment exists precisely to force a public reckoning with what unfitness looks like. Even where the votes are not there, the record is. It is written now in the Congressional Record by 36 doctors. It is written in the CREW filings on the president’s stock trades. It is written in the Ossoff report, the HRW investigation, the Amnesty findings, and the death certificates of 52 human beings who died in the government’s custody. History will not judge whether the amendment was successfully invoked. It will judge whether the country was told the truth about the man who was president when this system was built, and what the people who could have acted chose to do about it.
VI. What This Means for Every American
There is a version of this story that treats the abuses in immigration detention as somebody else’s problem — as a story about noncitizens whose constitutional protections are somehow lesser, whose lives are, at some accounting, worth less than the taxpayer dollars saved by outsourcing their captivity. That version is a lie, and it is a dangerous one. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, in their plain constitutional text, protect persons, not citizens. When the executive branch establishes that it can lock the doors to a facility, deny access to a member of Congress, and prosecute her for pushing back, that precedent does not remain sealed inside the ICE detention system. It becomes available for use against every other agency, every other inspection, every other reporter, every other political opponent.
The same instinct that suspends habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants suspends it for legal residents. The same instinct that lets a president’s stock portfolio benefit from a policy of mass detention lets a president’s stock portfolio benefit from any policy at all. The same revolving door between GEO Group and ICE has, per the American Immigration Council and Rep. Yassamin Ansari’s oversight letter, produced a system in which former ICE trainers testify that basic training was cut by 240 hours in 2025. That means armed federal agents with less training operating in American communities, and it means American citizens getting swept up in enforcement actions — a growing phenomenon that has already produced deaths of U.S. citizens and civil-liberties lawsuits.
Every American has a stake in whether their government can hold people in secret, whether their representatives can walk into a federally funded facility, whether their president’s donors are the same people warehousing human beings for $307,000 a bed. If any of those questions can be answered no with impunity, the constitutional order that protects everyone else is thinner than it looked yesterday.
VII. What Trump Is Doing to Protect Human Rights
The honest answer is: nothing meaningful. There is no White House initiative on detention-condition standards. There is no proposal to restore medical-provider payments cut off in October 2025. There is no directive requiring body-camera footage to be produced in death investigations. There is no promise to appear at the UN human-rights review the administration boycotted last fall. There is no plan to break the revolving door — the ethics waivers keep coming. What there is instead is a president who has spent the year purchasing shares in the corporations profiting off the crackdown; a border czar whose most recent job was a paid GEO Group consultancy; an acting ICE director who was, until fifteen months ago, a GEO Group vice president; a DHS secretary who redrafted the rules to keep Congress out; a deputy chief of staff who mused publicly about ending the writ of habeas corpus; and a Justice Department that has prosecuted the Congresswoman who tried to open the door.
What this administration is doing is not immigration policy. It is the construction of an industrial detention apparatus, staffed by former contractors, funded through opaque appropriations, shielded from oversight by federal indictment, and operated at record human cost for the private profit of two publicly traded corporations. What it says about the leadership of this country is unambiguous. The priority is not the border. The priority is not public safety. The priority — measurable in earnings calls, in stock trades, in campaign donations, and in the number of caskets — is the industrialization of cruelty as a revenue stream, and the neutralization of anyone who tries to make it visible.
Editorial Conclusion
A representative government cannot function when the executive branch is permitted to cage tens of thousands of people, hand the contracts to its donors, staff the enforcement agency with the donors’ former executives, and criminally prosecute the legislators who ask to see inside. That is not immigration policy. That is not federalism. That is authoritarianism with a fiscal quarter.
The 52 people who have died in ICE custody under this administration cannot testify. Rep. LaMonica McIver — who faces 17 years in federal prison for trying to walk into a facility her taxes paid for — is being told, by a divided court, that she cannot testify either. What remains is the record: a president who is unfit, a policy that is unconstitutional, and a democracy that is running out of time to say so out loud.
The Constitution does not lack the mechanism. What it lacks is a Cabinet with the courage to invoke it, a Congress with the majority to sustain it, and a country still willing to demand both.
Sources & References
- Roll CallRep. McIver Not Immune from Prosecution, Appeals Court Says (Aug. 26, 2026)
- New Jersey MonitorAppeals Court Rejects Rep. McIver’s Bid to Avoid Trial on Assault Charges (Aug. 26, 2026)
- TheGrioThird Circuit Opts Not to Dismiss Federal Charges Against Rep. McIver (Aug. 26, 2026)
- Office of Rep. McIverRULING: Third Circuit Declines to Dismiss U.S. v. McIver (Aug. 26, 2026)
- Human Rights Watch / PHRDying in Detention: Rising Deaths in an Expanding US Immigration Detention System (June 25, 2026)
- Physicians for Human RightsDying in Detention — Joint Medical & Human Rights Analysis (July 14, 2026)
- Kaiser Family FoundationDeaths and Health Care Issues in ICE Detention Centers Under the Second Trump Administration (Mar. 25, 2026)
- Office of Sen. Jon OssoffInvestigation Uncovers Over 1,000 Credible Reports of Human Rights Abuses in Immigration Detention (Jan. 27, 2026)
- Amnesty International USATorture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome (Dec. 2025)
- Common DreamsPrivate Prison Firm GEO Group Reports Record $254 Million Profit (Feb. 16, 2026)
- CREWTrump Has Made 29 Private Prison Stock Trades Since Taking Office (July 21, 2026)
- NPRA Former GEO Group Executive Now Runs ICE. The Company’s Government Ties Run Deep (June 4, 2026)
- NPRPrivate Prisons Announce $1.4 Billion in Revenue as Immigration Detentions Climb (Aug. 8, 2026)
- MSNBCPrivate Prisons Report Massive Profits from Aiding Trump’s Immigrant Crackdown (Aug. 10, 2026)
- PrismPrivate Prison Executives Revel in Profiting Off ICE Arrests in Earnings Calls (Oct. 23, 2025)
- HuffPostTrump’s ICE Pick David Venturella Is a Private Prison Veteran (May 14, 2026)
- Democracy ForwardMembers of Congress Sue Over Block of Oversight of Federal Immigration Detention Facilities (2026)
- ReasonThe Trump Administration Seriously Considered Unilaterally Suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus (June 17, 2026)
- House Judiciary DemsRaskin Demands White House Physician Evaluate Trump’s Cognitive Fitness (Apr. 10, 2026)
- The HillConcerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness for Presidency (June 2026)
- LawfareInternational Legal Challenges to the Trump Administration’s Immigration Policies (May 4, 2026)
- Rep. Deluzio’s OfficeBill to Expand Congressional Oversight at ICE Facilities (Aug. 17, 2026)
- Office of Rep. McIverMcIver Statement on Her Experience at Delaney Hall (May 10, 2025)
- Rep. Pressley’s OfficePressley, Min Introduce DHS Use of Force Transparency Act (Mar. 26, 2026)
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