Which private contractors received the largest ICE contracts after the 2025 budget surge and for what services?
Executive summary
The 2025 budget surge funneled tens of billions of dollars into ICE’s enforcement and detention missions, and the early spending went overwhelmingly to large private detention firms and a cluster of surveillance and services contractors; CoreCivic and GEO Group were the immediate big winners for detention capacity, while technology and surveillance vendors such as Palantir, Clearview AI, Cellebrite and spyware suppliers picked up high‑profile data and targeting contracts [1] [2] [3] [4]. Reporting and contract disclosures also show a new layer of specialty contractors — bounty‑hunter style vendors and intelligence/contractor hybrids like Bluehawk — being tapped for tracking, capture and counterintelligence tasks [5].
1. CoreCivic and GEO Group: the detention bed bonanza
Private prison operators CoreCivic and GEO Group saw some of the largest early awards and reactivations tied directly to the detention‑bed expansion mandated by the budget, including reopening large facilities and resuming operations at places such as the 2,400‑bed Dilley Immigration Processing Center (CoreCivic) and Delaney Hall in Newark (GEO Group), with both companies signaling to investors they expected robust contracting activity in 2025 and beyond [1] [2].
2. Palantir and ‘ImmigrationOS’: large data and prioritization contracts
Advocates and reporting flagged a roughly $30 million no‑bid award to Palantir to build an “ImmigrationOS” data system intended to merge government and private data to prioritize enforcement targets — an effort characterized as central to the new deportation apparatus and criticized for the risk that its targeting tools can be repurposed beyond stated aims [3].
3. Surveillance and biometric vendors: Clearview, Cellebrite, Paragon
Separately, facial‑recognition and phone‑forensics providers secured prominent contracts: ICE signed a reported $10 million deal with Clearview AI in September 2025, Cellebrite’s device‑extraction work for DHS components surged in 2025, and a $2 million contract with spyware maker Paragon was reactivated — together reflecting a shopping spree for intrusive surveillance tools [3] [4].
4. New entrants and bounty‑hunter contractors
Beyond longstanding prison and tech firms, records show ICE engaged niche security and intelligence contractors — for example, companies described in reporting as providers for ICE’s bounty‑hunter style immigrant‑capture programs and counterintelligence work, including Bluehawk and at least ten contractors identified by The Intercept as being paid to track and apprehend migrants [5].
5. The scale and political context that shaped winners
The unprecedented funding — various analyses place roughly $75 billion over four years for ICE with $45 billion tied to detention beds and roughly $30 billion for hiring and enforcement — created both the demand and political incentive structure that advantaged large private detention firms and surveillance vendors, and groups like CREW and Brennan Center linked those wins to prior lobbying and donations by some contractors [6] [7] [2].
6. Limits of the public record and competing narratives
Available reporting identifies the major categories of contractors and several named companies but does not provide a complete, ranked ledger of every dollar awarded after the 2025 surge; federal contract databases and ICE disclosures remain the primary sources for definitive totals, and some claims in advocacy pieces emphasize corporate political ties while industry statements stress readiness and legality — both perspectives are documented in the record [8] [2] [6].
7. What this implies going forward
The pattern is clear: bed capacity and detention operations funneled to CoreCivic and GEO‑style operators, while a second tier of surveillance‑tech and specialty contractors supplies the data, tools and operational services to find, target and transport people — a configuration critics call a “deportation‑industrial complex” and that proponents argue is simply scaling government capability to new policy priorities [1] [9] [2].