Editor’s note: The company Alt5 Sigma changed its name to AI Financial Corporation in April. Since most events in this story predate the name change, it is referred to as Alt5. This story is a collaboration between POGO Investigates and Political Wallet.

Last August, World Liberty Financial, a Trump family cryptocurrency venture, struck a deal with a publicly traded company called Alt5 Sigma. That deal would come under fire in a previously unreported shareholder lawsuit against Alt5 that alleged “illegality,” “unjust enrichment,” and “avarice.” The arrangement between the two businesses netted President Donald Trump and his family an estimated $500 million, a major chunk of Trump’s $1.4 billion in crypto-related income last year. In the months following the deal, Alt5’s stock price tanked by more than 90%.

The lawsuit, filed earlier this year and obtained from a Nevada state court by POGO Investigates, adds to concerns surrounding World Liberty Financial and Alt5 Sigma.

Some of those concerns, namely that Alt5 failed to disclose key information, have led to calls for the federal agency tasked with protecting investors — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — to probe the company. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the SEC told POGO Investigates this month that it could not find any investigation records involving Alt5 over the last year. Alt5’s spokesperson said the SEC is not investigating.

The SEC’s apparent lack of investigation of Alt5 comes as experts, lawmakers, and former government officials say the agency is failing to do its job when cryptocurrency — the biggest source of Trump’s income in his second term — is involved.

“The SEC abetting Trump’s corruption is a problem in its own right,” said Corey Frayer, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America and a former Biden-era SEC advisor on crypto markets, in an email. But Frayer also said the SEC’s hands-off approach is fueling distrust in U.S. markets, even as they reach new highs and attract trillions of dollars, including from U.S. workers’ retirement savings.

A cornerstone of the agency’s mission has been enforcing laws that require publicly traded companies to regularly and honestly disclose critical information to investors.

There are signs that criticism has not just come from outside the agency.

In March, the SEC’s head of enforcement, Margaret Ryan, abruptly quit after reportedly clashing with SEC Chair Paul Atkins and other appointees because she “wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle,” according to Reuters. Ryan had been on Trump’s first-term list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

She did not respond to a request for comment, and the SEC did not respond to multiple queries.

Enriching “the Company’s new stakeholders”

The February lawsuit was brought against Las Vegas-based Alt5, current and former Alt5 executives, and board members by a major Canadian investor named Bruce Bent.

His suit against the cryptocurrency payment services company claimed a “breakdown in the Company’s management” after World Liberty Financial leaders joined Alt5’s board of directors as part of the deal. The two World Liberty Financial executives who became Alt5 board members are its CEO Zach Witkoff and Chief Operating Officer Zak Folkman, who were defendants in the lawsuit.

(Zach Witkoff, Alt5’s board chairman, is the son of businessman Steve Witkoff, a “co-founder emeritus” of World Liberty Financial and a friend of the president’s who is serving in a wide-ranging diplomatic role. Steve Witkoff, Trump, and his family are not named as defendants.)

Bent’s lawsuit claimed that the deal with World Liberty Financial was “a large dilutive transaction that could only serve to enrich the Company’s new stakeholders, including new management and directors, by unlawful means.” The deal involved Alt5 issuing a large number of shares to buy $717 million worth of World Liberty cryptocurrency. It also involved World Liberty Financial getting a large stake in Alt5 by transferring $750 million worth of tokens, receiving 100 million shares in return.

After deducting expenses, 75% of World Liberty cryptocurrency sales benefit a company owned by Trump and his family, which is why the Trumps made an estimated $500 million from the Alt5 deal. In contrast, Bent’s lawsuit noted a sharp drop in Alt5 stock share prices after the deal was announced, and decreases for months after.

Bent’s lawsuit also claimed that specific decisions after the World Liberty Financial deal breached the company’s fiduciary duty to operate in shareholders’ best interests.

In a filing, Alt5 wrote that it “disputes the allegations concerning the Company and the named individual defendants and will vigorously defend itself and the other parties against the claims.”

Bent withdrew the lawsuit in late June “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be refiled. That can happen when a settlement is reached, when a plaintiff believes they can’t win or don’t want to pay for the cost of litigation, or for other reasons. Bent and his attorneys did not respond to queries.

A spokesperson for Alt5 Sigma, rebranded as AI Financial Corporation (AiFi) this spring, declined to say whether Bent’s lawsuit was dismissed due to a settlement. They said in an email to POGO Investigates that “AI Financial rejects any attempt to present third-party allegations as facts.”

In a late July press release, its CEO and board member Tony Isaac defended the company’s relationship with World Liberty Financial and the August 2025 deal, decrying what he described as “misleading reporting” on the finances involved. Isaac was another defendant in Bent’s lawsuit.

“World Liberty Financial’s interests are aligned with those of all our shareholders,” Isaac said. “World Liberty Financial does not control the AiFi Board.”

“Comparing the gains from cryptocurrency activity by stakeholders of another company (World Liberty Financial) in 2025 with investor paper losses,” Isaac said, “is not an apples-to-apples comparison.”

A spokesperson for World Liberty Financial declined to comment.

Bent’s lawsuit isn’t the only time concerns have been raised in connection with the Alt5 and World Liberty Financial transaction. In a complaint filed by several attorneys, the SEC has been asked explicitly to investigate whether Alt5 kept information secret from investors while raising money from them to fund the deal.

For the rest of the story, head over to POGO Investigates or Political Wallet.

By Dan Friedman, Will Sytsma, and Nick Schwellenbach

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.

For the rest of the story, head over to POGO Investigates or Mother Jones.

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and POGO Investigates.

Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, wants DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to cancel a nearly billion dollar contract awarded last year to a company called Salus Worldwide to carry out a Trump administration program to encourage undocumented immigrants to self-deport.

But Salus, in an unusually aggressive move, is hitting back, arguing that criticism of its contract is being drummed up by larger DHS contractors that it accuses of undermining the Trump administration’s voluntary deportation efforts to pad their own profits.

DHS in May 2025 gave Salus a contract worth up to $915 million to help administer what the administration calls “Project Homecoming,” by providing free plane tickets and $1,000 payments to immigrants who sign agreements to give up legal challenges to deportation and leave the country voluntarily.

The award drew a lawsuit from CSI Aviation, a major ICE contractor, alleging that the contract was “unlawful, rushed, and noncompetitive.” It also drew scrutiny from inside DHS. One department official said the procurement was flawed and “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus,” as Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported.

In a letter sent Friday to Mullin, Thompson called it “incomprehensible” that DHS this May okayed a six-month extension of Salus’ contract. “You must take immediate action to stop this wasteful and corrupt spending,” the Mississippi Democrat wrote.

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Thompson’s letter augurs what is sure to be intense scrutiny of DHS contracting by congressional Democrats if they win control of the House or the Senate next year. It comes as the Trump administration, which lacks the manpower to forcefully expel the millions of migrants it wants to push out of the country, relies heavily on “self-deportation” to persuade migrants to leave. After the Supreme Court recently allowed the administration to strip migrants from Haiti and Syria of temporary protected status, Mullin urged people from those countries to leave the US voluntarily.

Mullin is evaluating how to proceed with the Salus contract along with other DHS awards made under former Secretary Kristi Noem that have drawn controversy. Though DHS extended Salus’ contract in May, Walters said the contract is being recompeted with a new award in November.

Thompson, citing reporting by Mother Jones and POGO along with the Daily Beast, noted that Salus won the self-deportation contract in 2025 despite limited federal contracting experience, after Salus’ owner William Walters, a former State Department official, developed ties to top DHS officials. Walters in October 2024 donated $10,000 to a political action committee tied to Kristi Noem, who was DHS Secretary when Salus’ contract was awarded.

A federal judge this year threw out the lawsuit by CSI Aviation. The judge said that the contract had been awarded legally and noted that his review of the procurement process did not reveal “any evidence of bad faith or unfair dealings.”

But Thompson is just the latest of a series of congressional Democrats who have questioned the Salus contract.

Thompson’s letter states that Salus “is also part of a sweeping review by the DHS Office of Inspector General looking into whether Corey Lewandowski,” who formerly worked as a top advisor to Noem at DHS, “accepted kickbacks for granting government contracts.” Lewandowski has denied playing a role in DHS contracting or seeking kickbacks. Salus has charged in letters to lawmakers that an NBC News report that linked it to Lewandowski was false and “defamatory.” Salus threatened to sue NBC over the report but has not done so.

In a letter sent Monday to Thompson, Walters defended Salus’ performance and offered to meet with Thompson and work with the committee to “resolve this misunderstanding.”

In a statement to Mother Jones and POGO, Walters said that “Salus remains proud of the humane and dignified support that it has provided to over 130,000 people that have chosen to take the Assisted Voluntary Departure pathway.” Walters asserts that those efforts have saved US taxpayers “over $2.2 billion.” He derived that estimate from the added expense imposed by involuntary deportations, with extended detainments in government facilities.

Walters argues that those added costs boost the bottom line of contractors that provide detainment facilities and mandatory deportation out of the US. He pointed to GEO Group, the private prison behemoth that provides detention facilities to DHS, and CSI Aviation, the company that protested Salus’ contract and that provides flights for migrants being forcefully expelled from the US.

“Congressional letters have fallen victim to bogus tabloid reporting standards engineered by companies such as GEO Group and CSI Aviation who stand to profit the most from longer detention and custodial deportation of immigrants in chains,” Walters said in his statement to Mother Jones and POGO.

Walters noted that the GEO Group’s political action committee has given Thompson’s campaigns thousands of dollars since 2010. And he pointed out that Thompson’s former longtime chief of staff, Lanier Avant, since 2019 has worked as a lobbyist for GEO Group. Avant’s recent lobbying disclosure forms say his work for the company focuses on the House of Representatives.

Avant did not respond to inquiries. Nor did spokespeople for GEO Group and CSI Aviation.

A Homeland Security Committee aide questioned Walters’ claims: “There is nothing ‘humane and dignified’ about helping migrants deport out of fear because DHS ran advertising campaigns threatening to hunt them down.” The aide said Salus’ claims about savings rely on a dubious calculation that all migrants who have left the country under Project Homecoming would have been detained and incurred costs to house and feed. “Plus, how many beds is the government already paying for whether in use or not?” the staffer asked.

The suggestion that GEO Group is influencing Thompson, who has been the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee for more than 20 years, is complicated by Thompson’s record of aggressive oversight of GEO Group and other contractors. Last month, Thompson and committee Democrats ripped DHS and GEO Group over conditions at the Delaney Hall detention facility in New Jersey, which the contractor operates. “Given DHS’s and GEO Group’s unwillingness to address these deplorable conditions and treat persons detained there humanely, we demand that you close Delaney Hall immediately,” the lawmakers wrote. Committee Democrats also held a field hearing near the facility.

“If DHS or any of its contractors have engaged in waste, fraud, or abuse, we will investigate and hold them accountable on behalf of the American people,” Thompson said in a statement. “This is a fact.”

This story, first published at POGO Investigates, prompted the Campaign Legal Center to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission claiming that the “GEO Group, American Liberty Foundation, and an affiliated 501(c)(4) dark money group, American Liberty Action Fund, violated federal campaign finance laws that prohibit making or knowingly soliciting a federal contractor contribution.”

ICE’s largest detention contractor, GEO Group, made a quarter-million-dollar “dark money” donation last year to a group aligned with Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs a key congressional committee overseeing ICE. GEO made the contribution shortly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a massive law that nearly triples ICE’s budget and funds the doubling of immigrant detention space, which experts say is likely to boost GEO’s revenues.

The company is most known for running the largest number of privately operated ICE detention centers and for operating private prisons. One of its subsidiaries also holds the ICE contract for monitoring immigrants who are not detained who are awaiting immigration court hearings, and that subsidiary won a “skip tracing” contract in December worth up to $121 million to locate immigrants for ICE to arrest.

A Jordan-aligned super PAC, American Liberty Foundation, revealed the donation erroneously in a Federal Election Commission filing, according to a GEO Group spokesperson, and wrongly attributed the donation to GEO Group’s political action committee. Instead, the contribution actually came from a GEO Group account, according to the company spokesperson.

GEO Group’s spokesperson said in an email to POGO Investigates that “the $250,000 contribution in question was not made by GEO’s Political Action Committee and was made to American Liberty Action Fund, a C4 entity.” The American Liberty Action Fund has the same leadership as the similarly named super PAC.

American Liberty Action Fund’s website states that “Under IRS rules, contributions to ALAF are not publicly disclosed, and there are no limits on contributions from individuals or corporations.”

Donations made to entities registered under this part of the Internal Revenue Code, 501(c)(4), are normally kept from the public, which is why donations to these groups are known as “dark money.” This $250,000 contribution appears to be the first publicly known instance of a dark money donation by GEO Group.

The strange circumstances around the $250,000 donation prompted concern from a campaign finance watchdog.

“When a super PAC fails to accurately report where it’s getting its money, that not only violates the law and deprives voters of crucial information they need to make informed electoral decisions, it could also be concealing other illicit activity,” said Saurav Ghosh, the non-profit Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform. One potential concern Ghosh highlighted is the potential that the super PAC has been “taking money from federal contractors, which are categorically barred from making political contributions.”

“Transparency about the sources of money spent on elections is essential to our democracy,” said Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission enforcement attorney, in an emailed statement.

GEO Group’s Donations

American Liberty Action Fund and the American Liberty Foundation share the same president, secretary, and treasurer, according to their most recent publicly available annual reports to the Internal Revenue Service. The president of both groups, Ray Yonkura, was Jordan’s former chief of staff for nearly a decade, spanning the start of Jordan’s tenure in Congress in January 2007 and serving until November 2017, except for a period in 2012 when he worked on a political campaign. The treasurer for both groups, Thomas Datwyler, has worked for multiple political committees and has racked up tens of thousands of dollars in Federal Election Commission fines, such as for failing to report contributions.

Neither Yonkura nor Datwyler responded to multiple requests for comment.

The spokesperson for the private prison giant identified the source of the $250,000 donation as “The GEO Group Inc. Political Contribution Account,” a fund controlled by the company. He declined to address whether GEO Group has made other dark money contributions, or any other questions.

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“Dark money is a problem no matter where it comes from, but is especially troubling coming from federal contractors,” wrote experts from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice in 2015. “It is implausible to think that the politicians who benefit from such spending do not feel gratitude towards their benefactors — and when the benefactor is a federal contractor, opportunities to tip the scale in its favor in return are legion.”

While this quarter-million-dollar, dark money donation opens a new window into GEO’s influence efforts, those that were previously disclosed are sizeable.

The ICE detention contractor’s political activity and lobbying report for 2025 states the company’s subsidiaries and its PAC gave $4,425,400 in political contributions that year. The company has disclosed giving to political campaigns as well as other political groups that aim to influence elections. One of those is MAGA, Inc, the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump. In recent months alone, a GEO subsidiary called GEO Reentry Services LLC gave several $1 million contributions to MAGA, Inc: one in October 2025, one in March 2026, and one again in April 2026.

There are limits on how much each U.S. citizen can give to political campaign committees, and corporations cannot donate to them directly (although they can donate through their own PACs). However, corporations can give unlimited amounts directly to super PACs.

Federal contractors are barred from giving to super PACs, but GEO has argued some of its subsidiaries are allowed to donate because they don’t hold federal contracts. The Federal Election Commission deadlocked 3 to 3 on this issue in such a case involving GEO, and ultimately closed it in 2021 without finding any violation.

Both political campaign committees and super PACs must disclose their fundraising and expenditures regularly to the Federal Election Commission.

However, according to GEO’s spokesperson, GEO Group’s donation to the American Liberty Action Fund is to a 501(c)(4) group. Groups organized under this portion of the tax code are not supposed to engage in political advocacy as their primary activities, but rather can advocate on issues and lobby for legislation. The American Liberty Action Fund’s website states it educates the public “on how unchecked bureaucracy threatens your freedoms,” among other values and actions it takes, but it contains little beyond a homepage, which has a sign-up for text and email alerts and offers ways to donate.

There are no limitations on how much donors can give to these groups — and the groups can keep their donors secret. Companies like GEO Group also do not have to disclose these donations. (Some companies’ shareholders have forced them to voluntarily disclose; that’s not the case at GEO.)

Congressional Oversight, Rep. Jordan, and the GEO Group

GEO’s $250,000 donation came on July 15, 2025, according to a filing by the American Liberty Foundation — 11 days after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a bill GEO lobbied on in the months before it became law. That law is expected to boost the company’s bottom line through a massive expansion in ICE’s budget of tens of billions of dollars.

Jordan was a vocal booster of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s passage. In a social media post, he wrote “It delivers Big, Beautiful Deportations” and “It boosts Border Patrol and ICE agents on the frontlines.” These parts of the law intersect with the jurisdiction of the congressional panel that Jordan chairs: the House Judiciary Committee. Its website says, “Particularly important in our time is the Committee’s oversight responsibility for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.”

GEO’s $250,000 donation last year to a group with ties to Jordan dwarfs any previously disclosed spending by GEO Group on political organizations connected to the lawmaker. Jordan’s campaign received $12,500 in contributions from GEO Group’s PAC from 2022 through 2024. There is no record of donations from the PAC to Jordan’s campaigns in other years, and there is no other record of American Liberty Foundation or another Jordan-affiliated PAC receiving funds from the GEO Group or its PAC.

Under Jordan’s leadership, the House Judiciary Committee’s current majority has avoided public scrutiny of top administration officials who’ve formerly worked at or on behalf of the GEO Group, even when their current government work could influence the company’s revenue and profits.

Since February 2025, for example, former GEO Group executive David Venturella has held a senior advisor position within DHS. He was reportedly hired by White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who formerly worked as a GEO consultant. Earlier this month, the Trump administration tapped Venturella to run ICE.

Venturella and Homan’s influence and ties to GEO prompted concerns last August from three Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee.

“In light of these grave concerns and your past work for GEO Group, you may have an actual conflict of interest—and certainly the appearance of one—if you are participating in or influencing agency decisions or actions that could affect the spending of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars with your former client,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote to Homan.

Neither Jordan nor any members on the committee’s majority signed the letter.

A spokesperson for Jordan did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally published at POGO Investigates.

Since U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on January 3, companies have made significant plays for Venezuela’s mineral resources. According to official disclosures, at least seven companies have hired lobbying firms with close connections to the Trump White House to lobby the administration on accessing Venezuelan oil and natural resources, and related issues such as permissions to operate.

The growing line of Venezuela-related lobbying by Trump-linked firms underscores the view that getting favored treatment from U.S. agencies entails gaining access to top U.S. officials through people with insider access — and some of those U.S. agencies exercise significant control over who does business with the Latin American country’s oil industry.

Indeed, Brian Ballard, president of Ballard Partners, the deeply Trump-linked lobbying firm winning several new clients after Maduro’s capture, said on a recent podcast that “there’s eight or 10 people in the administration on all the issues that really matter that come to him [President Donald Trump] directly.”

“Big decisions are made by him after he hears all the evidence. And I think that’s unique,” Ballard said, remarking on how much decision-making is centralized in the Trump presidency and how his firm has access to people close to the president. “We’ve had the pleasure of knowing these folks for a long, long time, and so it gives us an advantage.”

The administration’s initial deals with companies to sell Venezuela’s oil, potential corruption, and other concerns with the handling of Venezuelan mineral resources have led Democratic lawmakers to ask pointed oversight questions in letters to the White House and federal agencies, including as recently as this month.

The White House dismissed questions about whether the administration played favorites with the businesses being allowed access to Venezuela’s natural resources. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers in an email to POGO. “Thanks to President Trump, great progress has quickly been made in Venezuela--critical minerals, mining, oil and gas, and other industries are moving at ‘Trump Speed’ to invest in newfound Venezuelan markets.”

“That Money Will Be Controlled By Me”

Immediately in the wake of Maduro’s capture, the administration signaled that a handful of top officials were key decision-makers when it came to Venezuela’s resources, and, as previously reported, the first companies winning deals appeared well-plugged in.

“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” Trump wrote on January 6. Days later, on January 9, Trump issued an executive order directing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to manage the oil revenue with guidance from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a top administration voice who pushed for Maduro’s capture.

During a January 9 White House meeting with a range of firms, including some of the world’s largest oil companies, Trump said Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would be involved in the deals as well, adding, “We’re going to be making the decision as to which oil companies are going to go in.”

Ballard Partners’ New Venezuela Working Group

The lobbying firm winning the lion’s share of this business so far is Ballard Partners, well known for its ties to Trump and Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who helped set up Ballard Partners’ DC office and was first introduced to Trump by Brian Ballard.

Ten days after Maduro’s capture, on January 13, Ballard Partners announced a new dedicated Venezuela Working Group and touted “former high-ranking government Trump administration officials” working at the firm.

That same day, Ballard registered Swedish-based investment company Maha Capital as a new client seeking assistance with “approvals for Venezuelan oil field acquisitions and operations.” Micah Ketchel and Thomas Boodry, former Trump aides who’ve also worked for Rubio, were listed as part of the lobbying team. Maha Capital paid Ballard $120,000 in the first quarter of 2026 to lobby both the State and Treasury departments.

On March 18, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) authorized “established” U.S. entities to do business with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), paving the way for Maha Capital to move forward inside Venezuela. In a press release that same day, Maha Capital’s CEO said he was “pleased” with the decision, and the company announced it would buy a stake in a Venezuelan oil field and would transfer that stake to its U.S.-based subsidiaries to comply with the OFAC decision. Maha Capital did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon after, a host of other companies hired Ballard as well — and like Maha Capital, they’ve all been foreign companies.

Panama-based Knob Petroleum, which provides services related to drilling and oil and gas infrastructure, hired Ballard to lobby on “Venezuelan operations and permissions.” Knob Petroleum paid Ballard $70,000 to lobby the State and Treasury departments during the first quarter of the year. In early March, the company announced a Venezuelan subsidiary had finished a project improving transport and handling of a type of heavy crude oil from the country’s Orinoco Belt, home to the world’s largest known reserves of heavy crude. Knob Petroleum did not respond to POGO’s query.

The Spain-based consulting company Elo Atlantic SL hired Ballard to provide “strategic advisory services on potential natural resource exploration initiatives in Venezuela, with a focus on navigating U.S. regulatory, sanctions, and policy dynamics.” Elo Atlantic SL paid Ballard $380,000 for the first quarter of the year, including for the services provided by William Russell, a first-term White House staffer, although the disclosure states no federal government entities were lobbied. The company did not respond to questions.

Thailand-based Tipco Asphalt Public Company Limited hired Ballard for “guidance pertaining to licenses and/or authorizations from the State Department to acquire Venezuelan crude directly from Venezuela.” Tipco Asphalt paid Ballard $60,000 for the first quarter of the year for lobbying both the State and Treasury departments.

A 2020 Associated Press investigation found that Tipco Asphalt played a key role in allowing Venezuela’s state-run oil company to mitigate U.S. sanctions. The Associated Press reported on records showing that Tipco Asphalt’s arrangement with PDVSA allowed the state-run company “to move hundreds of millions of dollars around the world that it might not be able to otherwise.” Tipco Asphalt has said its actions were legal, and it has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

“Consistent with what most companies are doing with respect to entering the newly opened Venezuela market, and with reference to your inquiry, Tipco Asphalt has engaged several U.S. consulting and law firms to advise on the latest developments relating to U.S. sanctions against Venezuela,” a Tipco Asphalt spokesperson told POGO via email. “This is part of its normal regulatory monitoring and advisory processes.”

Even a Venezuelan-based company, Vale Maritimo C.A., hired Ballard to lobby on “Venezuelan operations and permissions.” The company paid Ballard $70,000 to lobby the State and Treasury departments during the first quarter of the year. A Ballard filing describes Vale Maritimo as a “Mining company,” although a website with importation data and a job posting indicates the company has been involved in shipping. POGO was unable to reach the company.

“Following President Trump’s leadership and Maduro’s removal, the United States constructed a licensing framework through OFAC and the State Department to permit lawful, transparent commercial engagement with Venezuela and to channel that activity through regulated rather than sanctioned pathways,” said Justin Sayfie, a partner with Ballard, in an emailed statement. “Ballard Partners is proud to represent clients who have chosen the regulated, transparent path, because the reconstruction of Venezuela’s economy is squarely in the United States’ foreign policy interest and will be advanced by companies willing to do business with U.S. partners and within U.S. law.”

Lobbying Began Even Before Maduro’s Capture

Before Ballard saw an influx of Venezuelan-related work, other firms had been lobbying the administration before Maduro was captured. Some of these clients won big after control of the country’s oil shifted to the U.S.

A major early moment was the January 9 White House meeting. At the table were two controversial oil trading companies — Vitol and Trafigura — that won the first U.S. deals regarding Venezuelan oil and had lobbied the Trump administration last year.

Vitol and Trafigura had previously been accused by the U.S. Justice Department of bribing foreign officials and paid settlements in 2024 to resolve claims of market manipulation inside the U.S. Trafigura pleaded guilty to the foreign bribery charges, and Vitol entered into a deferred prosecution agreement.

A senior employee for Vitol donated millions of dollars to Trump-aligned political action committees and was in the January 9 White House meeting but has since retired from Vitol, according to a company spokesperson. In a January filing, Vitol’s lobbyists at Crossroads Strategies disclosed they had engaged in advocacy efforts on “global energy markets” aimed at the Executive Office of the President in the immediate months before Maduro’s capture. Crossroads’ lobbying work for Vitol ended on December 31, 2025. Vitol’s spokesperson did not answer questions about the role of its lobbyists, or if they have done any Venezuelan-related work.

Trafigura hired The Ragnar Group last summer, which has disclosed that its lobbyist and co-founder Robert Wasinger lobbied the State and Energy departments on “energy issues,” including at the start of this year. The Ragnar Group’s website describes Wasinger as “one of the first senior members” on Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Trafigura says Ragnar played no role with regard to Venezuela. “Neither Ragnar Group, nor any other lobbying firm, lobbied any US government department in connection with our activities in Venezuela,” a Trafigura spokesperson emailed POGO in response to questions. “More broadly, as a major commodities and energy supplier to and exporter from the US, Trafigura engages external advisors from time to time to assist in engaging with policymakers, to share industry perspectives and understand emerging areas of policy in an important market.”

Whether it played a role or not, The Ragnar Group was not the only Trump-tied firm hired prior to Maduro’s capture that saw a client benefit afterwards.

Hired last spring, Checkmate Government Relations has disclosed being paid $720,000 over the last year by French oil company Maurel & Prom for “Agency engagement focused on sanctions and energy policy related to Venezuela.” Two former White House staffers and Chris LaCivita Jr., the son of one of Trump’s top 2024 campaign managers, have been part of Checkmate’s lobbying team on the account, which has targeted the White House and several agencies.

Early last year, shortly before Maurel & Prom hired Checkmate Government Relations, the Trump administration revoked a license allowing the French oil company to work in Venezuela when Maduro was still in charge. After Maduro’s capture, the Treasury Department allowed Maurel & Prom to operate in Venezuela again, beginning in February.

Maurel & Prom and Checkmate Government Relations did not respond to POGO’s requests for comment.

The oil majors Shell and Chevron also lobbied the White House and other agencies on Venezuelan issues before Maduro’s capture, according to disclosures. Since January, other major oil industry companies’ in-house lobbyists, including BP America and Baker Hughes, have added Venezuela to their lobbying agenda.

Lobby Shops with High-Level State Department Ties

One agency that’s been a target of these lobbying firms’ efforts is the State Department, which has an important role when it comes to Venezuela’s oil industry. These firms have hired former State Department officials with high-level department experience from Trump’s first term, and others with Trump ties.

Secretary of State Rubio has been seen as a particularly influential administration figure when it comes to Venezuela, where he has long said there is a case for using the U.S. military to remove Maduro. As both secretary of state and national security adviser, Rubio has vast influence over U.S. foreign policy, and the Trump administration’s national security strategy states that a Western Hemisphere that “supports critical supply chains” is part of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (what some are calling the “Donroe Doctrine”).

Under a standing executive order from Trump’s first term, the ability of companies to do business with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company is blocked and subject to sanctions unless otherwise authorized by the Treasury Department, in consultation with the State Department. Rubio has been seen as so central to these decisions that some called Rubio the new “viceroy” of Venezuela after Maduro was captured.

Thus, the State Department is seen as a critical stop for oil industry lobbyists interested in Venezuelan resources.

Helmerich & Payne, a U.S. oil and gas drilling company, hired Continental Strategy in March for “Advocacy related to U.S. energy security and commercial engagement/compliance in Venezuela.” An April 2026 disclosure shows Continental Strategy was paid $45,000 for less than a month of work lobbying the State Department.

The firm’s lobbyists on the account include its founder and president, Carlos Trujillo, who was nominated as both an ambassador to the Organization of American States and later unsuccessfully as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs during Trump’s first term. Trujillo has been described as a friend of Rubio’s and a “Top Latino Strategist for Trump.” Katie Wiles, the daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, also works at Continental Strategy (she was promoted the day after her mother was announced as Trump’s new chief of staff after the 2024 election), although she is not listed as a lobbyist for Helmerich & Payne.

Trujillo recently remarked to a magazine that “Washington, DC is experiencing a fundamental disruption — a black swan event where traditional lobbying and public affairs strategies that dominated the past 40 years are being upended.” He said his firm’s insider connections allow them “uniquely to guide clients through this period of historic change with insight and effectiveness that others simply cannot match.”

It is not entirely clear what Helmerich & Payne’s Venezuelan lobbying agenda relates to, but more than 15 years ago, the Hugo Chavez-led Venezuelan government seized 11 Helmerich & Payne drilling rigs, which sparked an ongoing and long-running legal battle in U.S. courts.

Neither Continental Strategy nor Helmerich & Payne responded to requests for comment. Back in January, a Helmerich & Payne spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the company was somewhat wary of reentering Venezuela. “Any consideration of future activity would depend on a careful evaluation of potential partnerships, political and economic conditions and appropriate legal and financial protections,” she said.

An oil and gas equipment manufacturer named Salamander Solutions hired the firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck to lobby on “issues related to oil developments and production in Venezuela.” The company paid the firm $230,000 for its services in the first quarter of the year and lobbied the Executive Office of the President, the National Economic Council, and the departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, State, and Treasury. Salamander Solutions did not respond to a request for comment.

Samantha Carl-Yoder, one of the Brownstein lobbyists on the Salamander Solutions account, served at the State Department across multiple administrations. One of her last roles at State, during Trump’s first term, was as chief of staff for the under secretary for political affairs, and she advised on issues regarding Venezuela and energy matters, according to her LinkedIn profile. In February, she was appointed to the board of directors of Ivanhoe Atlantic, a mining company, which her lobbying firm touted on its website.

The next month she traveled to Venezuela when Interior Secretary Burgum visited, and their paths appear to have crossed. She traveled with the geologist son of billionaire Robert Friedland, the person in charge of Ivanhoe’s majority stakeholder.

“Proud to represent Ivanhoe Atlantic Inc with Govind Friedland on Secretary Burgum’s trip to Venezuela last week,” Carl-Yoder wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Tremendous opportunities for US companies to invest in Venezuela’s mining and oil and gas sectors. Can’t wait to see how this develops!”

On LinkedIn, Carl-Yoder posted a picture of Burgum standing next to Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, taken from just feet away, as well as a photo of what appears to be an official meeting.

“We cannot speak on if she met with him directly but clearly, she was in the room on behalf of her company as her post suggests. She did not travel with Secretary Burgum or the delegation,” said an Interior Department spokesperson in an email. “She was a representative of Ivanhoe for a mining meeting not oil and gas. She was not a guest of Interior.” Carl-Yoder did not respond to a request for comment.

Carl-Yoder’s post thanks the U.S. embassy in Venezuela “for all their support!”

There’s a tendency by many to overly look at high-profile issues through a partisan lens, particularly when they are tightly associated with presidential candidates and are discussed in an abstract way. But when an agenda goes from campaign trail slogans to implementation, the consequences can become clearer, and the views of supporters can become more nuanced. Hardline immigration enforcement and the border wall are top administration priorities — and are running into this.

As Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican, recently said on C-SPAN, “you could be for all kinds of things in principle, but you don’t think necessarily that they should happen right here.”

Here are four recent press stories showing there isn’t the neat red-blue, rural-city, conservative-liberal divide over these issues that our politics often assume:

“When ICE Blows Through Rural America,” by The American Prospect’s Emma Janssen:

Gjersvik is just one of an informal, quiet, and multiracial network of locals who have mobilized in the past two months as ICE swarmed into Albert Lea. These residents balance their day jobs with going to the Mexican grocery store to pick up food for families, patrolling the town’s poorer streets where ICE agents tend to pop up, and preparing to show up to an active raid or abduction at the drop of a hat.

The same work is being undertaken in rural communities all across Minnesota, from the charming college town of Northfield to snow-covered Willmar. It’s happening in the larger St. Cloud region and in the other meat-processing towns like Albert Lea’s neighbor Austin.

You can’t always tell who is part of these networks, and that’s what makes them powerful. They’re fresh out of college—and retirees. They’re longtime protesters—and “apolitical” people who suddenly realized they couldn’t sit idly by any longer. They’re pastors and imams, brewery owners and teachers.

“A Border Wall Plan Unites Republicans and Democrats in Texas: ‘This Is Insane,’” by The New York Times’ J. David Goodman:

“Sensible people who look at what’s being proposed here think this is insane,” said JP Bryan, a conservative former oil executive who owns two ranches and a popular hotel in the Big Bend region. “Anyone who supports this ought to put their name on this wall, so it can go down in infamy forever.”

“Florida Sheriffs rebel against Trump's, DeSantis' mass deportation efforts,” by the Florida Phoenix’s Liv Caputo:

Florida’s Republican sheriffs want President Donald Trump to end mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes, a striking shift from law enforcement in the nation’s most aggressive anti-undocumented immigration state.

“While Congress sits on their hands and does nothing about this, we are on the ground floor with this day in and day out — looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately. But some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Monday during a State Immigration Enforcement Council meeting.

He plans to draft a letter to Trump, the U.S. House Speaker, and the Senate majority leader urging better guidelines over which undocumented immigrants should be targeted for deportation.

Judd’s comments are remarkable. A leading conservative, he’s also chair of the four-sheriff and four-police chief council tapped by Republican leaders last year to shape hardline immigration policy. He’s also a favorite of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“ICE detention facilities face Republican revolt,” by Axios’ Avery Lotz and Brittany Gibson:

While Republicans may back the president’s immigration blitz on a national level, they’ve been leading voices of local pushback against ICE’s warehouse expansion while hinting at an old refrain: not-in-my-backyard.

The big picture: Republican elected officials in Mississippi, New Hampshire, Tennessee and beyond have fought proposed facilities in their states.

…

Potential deals and rumored DHS leads have also reportedly been scuttled in Texas, Missouri, Virginia and Utah with the real estate owners pulling out of sales amid public outcry.

This was originally published over at POGO Investigates.

Years after Edward Snowden’s jaw-dropping disclosures of sweeping domestic surveillance, the National Security Agency (NSA) continued to violate key rules limiting the government’s ability to conduct warrantless searches of Americans’ electronic communications, according to a declassified September 2021 federal watchdog report obtained by POGO Investigates. The report also found that the NSA still failed to have a system in place meant to prevent these violations of Americans’ privacy rights, more than half a decade after pledges that internal oversight and agency reforms, made in the months following Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, would curb abuses.

POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight, obtained and declassified this inspector general report through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. It sheds additional light on how the secretive and powerful spy agency, which amasses huge troves of electronic data, has faced challenges protecting civil liberties well after NSA contractor Snowden’s disclosures. The information Snowden revealed gave the public a concerning inside look at how the agency’s expansive surveillance programs worked in practice and how this surveillance put their privacy at risk.

A senior lawmaker on the Senate Judiciary Committee recently cited his frustration with spy agencies claiming that their internal systems are enough to stop improper use of sensitive and private data obtained under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

“Each time we bring up this issue or another issue related to it,” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said during a January hearing, “the arguments go something like this: ‘Yes, there have been problems in the past. Yes, there have been abuses of FISA 702. But you need not worry because we now have procedures in place, administrative procedures that will fix the problem once and for all.”

Sometimes described as the “crown jewel” of America’s surveillance authorities with up to 60% of the President’s Daily Brief in 2023 using information derived from it, according to the intelligence community, Section 702 has detractors across the political spectrum. Those have included Tulsi Gabbard, the current director of national intelligence. At one point, she introduced legislation to repeal Section 702, but later spoke in support of the law in advance of her Senate confirmation last year.

Section 702 expires on April 20 unless Congress renews it, potentially with reforms that Lee and other lawmakers support, although President Donald Trump recently told Republican members of Congress he wants the law extended with no changes. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, is reportedly a top supporter of extending the law without reforms. (Disclosure: POGO is advocating for reforms to Section 702.)

The debate over Section 702 comes as concerns have been broadly rising about the federal government’s surveillance powers in the context of immigration enforcement. The NSA said in February 2024 that it uses 702 data to vet non-U.S. persons seeking to travel to the U.S., specifically “for counterterrorism purposes.” Two months later, and the last time 702 was renewed, Congress explicitly authorized in statute the use of 702 powers for “the vetting of all non-United States persons who are being processed for travel to the United States.” (Italics added.)

That provision drew concerns from both sides of the aisle, in part because it could drastically expand surveillance. “I fear that codifying this provision — especially without meaningful safeguards — would give those who capitalize on fear and xenophobia an important tool to pursue their agenda,” said Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) at the time.

“Unauthorized Queries”

Section 702 allows the NSA to target the electronic communications of people who are not U.S. persons going through U.S.-based electronic communications service providers if there is a reasonable belief those people are out of the U.S. and may be in possession of foreign intelligence information. “U.S. persons” mostly refers to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents of the U.S., or “an organization incorporated in the United States (unless incorporated by certain foreign powers),” according to the intelligence community.

(The vetting amendment to the 2024 reauthorization of FISA appears to give the government the ability to use 702 to vet “all” non-U.S. persons traveling to the U.S. and does not require a belief they are in possession of foreign intelligence. NSA did not respond to POGO Investigates’ request for comment.)

But in sweeping up those communications, the agencies end up collecting information on Americans emailing, texting, or calling the non-U.S. persons the agencies target.

The NSA, FBI, CIA, and National Counterterrorism Center can then search through — or query — the 702 data but are supposed to follow certain rules to minimize the chance that Americans’ civil liberties and privacy are violated. These queries are often referred to as “backdoor searches.”

The NSA Office of Inspector General report found that the agency had not finished developing a system for preventing the improper agency querying of “United States person identifiers” in sensitive intelligence data. The report states that this systemic shortcoming, if not addressed, meant the agency was more at risk of “violating civil liberties and individual privacy rights” of Americans.

“As the amount of content and metadata queries performed by NSA analysts increases,” the declassified report warned, “so does the Agency’s risk of analysts performing unauthorized queries.” (Metadata is information about electronic communications such as the date and time an email, call, or text occurred, and who sent and received them.)

The NSA queried intelligence data using terms that were not approved by the agency’s general counsel and didn’t comply with procedures authorized by a special court overseeing the federal government’s foreign surveillance efforts, according to the report. Numerous details, such as the number of queries that didn’t comply with the rules, are redacted.

The most recent publicly available data on the NSA’s compliance with the rules governing querying 702 data covers a period of June 2022 through November 2022 — after the declassified inspector general report was issued internally at the NSA. The compliance data showed errors increased: “During this reporting period, the number of improper queries increased by 7.7 percent, as compared to the prior period.”

The declassified NSA inspector general report examined queries between January 19, 2019, and March 19, 2019, and highlighted two instances where the rules weren’t followed. One NSA analyst reported their own noncompliance after discovering that the daily queries they made over several weeks weren’t approved by the general counsel. In another case, a “post-query review auditor” at the NSA found that an analyst was searching through data outside of the time frame approved by the general counsel.

The inspector general’s office made 13 recommendations to the NSA, which appear to have been closed since the watchdog does not list them as open in its semiannual reporting to Congress.

NSA’s Office of Inspector General responded that POGO Investigates’ queries “would be more appropriately addressed by NSA.” NSA did not respond to multiple queries.

A Controversial “Crown Jewel”

Section 702 has long been controversial across the political spectrum due to privacy concerns and the mass amount of data being swept up by the federal government.

While the government has said the vast majority of the problems associated with Section 702 are administrative snafus, and its defenders say some incidents have been overblown, others say the legal authority is too broad and too unchecked.

“It has been the government’s permission slip for warrantless spying on Americans,” said Brett Tolman, a former U.S. Attorney for Utah and former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel, in congressional testimony in December.

Tolman cited two NSA incidents that occurred after the inspector general report was finished. In one, an NSA analyst sought information on two people they met through an online dating service. In another, two NSA analysts sought information on a non-U.S. citizen considering renting a property owned by the analysts.

“This is not national security intelligence gathering; it is domestic spying,” said Tolman, who is the executive director of Right On Crime, a national criminal justice campaign of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Law and Justice Campaign.

Even though a 2023 review by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board stated there are “relatively” few instances of noncompliance at the NSA, and most are discovered internally, others have sharply criticized the NSA well after Snowden’s disclosures. A 2017 decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court called out the NSA for “institutional ‘lack of candor’” because the agency failed to reveal queries violating a prohibition on searching for information on U.S. citizens in certain types of data collected under 702.

That 2023 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board review explains scenarios where the intelligence community could be interested in information involving U.S. citizens. “With regard to U.S. person queries, they help [intelligence] personnel ‘connect the dots’—that is, uncover plots, identify bad actors, and recognize links between foreign intelligence targets and U.S. persons,” the review states.

Nonetheless, the board found the FBI’s use of 702 of particular concern.

“There was little justification provided to the Board on the relative value of the close to 5 million searches conducted by the FBI from 2019 to 2022,” the board’s 2023 review states. Many of the most recent incidents drawing scrutiny have involved the FBI, such as queries involving the names of a U.S. senator, state lawmakers, a state judge, and Black Lives Matter protestors.

However, last year the Justice Department’s watchdog reported that “the FBI is no longer engaging in the widespread noncompliant querying of U.S. persons that was pervasive just a few years ago.”

According to the most recent publicly available federal data, the FBI’s approved searches of U.S. person terms dropped steeply from 2023 to 2024; however, the NSA, CIA, and National Counterterrorism Center more than doubled their use of approved U.S. person query terms from 3,755 terms in 2023 to 7,845 terms in 2024. Due to a lag in agency reporting on compliance, it is publicly unknown how many times these agencies’ searches violated the rules in recent years.

Two senators have recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would reauthorize the law with more safeguards, such as requiring a warrant before agencies can access the content of Americans’ communications.

“Section 702 is a valuable tool to help keep our nation safe,” said Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) in a February 23 statement introducing the Section 702 reform bill he is co-sponsoring with Senator Lee. “However, it’s being used to conduct thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ private communications. That’s unacceptable.”

Advocates are also pushing back on reauthorizing 702 without reforms.

“The widespread and continuing failures to honor privacy protections should give lawmakers pause as the government once again asks Congress to entrust the government with immense quantities of Americans’ private data,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program, in congressional testimony this January. “Warrantless access to Americans’ private communications is an invitation to governmental overreach and abuse under any administration.”

This story was co-authored with Dan Friedman, and originally published at Mother Jones and POGO Investigates.

Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Security Secretary, but a luxury 737 she has traveled on remains in government hands. That plane, reportedly dubbed the “Big, Beautiful Jet” by DHS staffers, has been quietly leased to the department by a company linked to William Walters, a former State Department official who donated thousands of dollars to a pro-Noem political action committee. Walters owns a constellation of businesses that—despite a dearth of prior experience working for the government—won lucrative contracts with Noem’s DHS over the past year.

One Walters company is selling half a dozen planes to DHS, in a deal that has raised questions within the department and on Capitol Hill about the cost of the aircraft. Another firm owned by Walters landed a contract worth up to $915 million last year, through a procurement process that one DHS official said was flawed and “created an appearance of favoritism,” according to previously unreported court documents.

President Donald Trump fired Noem Thursday, announcing via social media that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) will replace her at the end of the month. But her exit doesn’t undo the massive deals that DHS struck with a vast array of contractors, many with close ties to Noem, her adviser Corey Lewandowski, and other top administration officials.

The 737 jet gained extensive attention in February when the Wall Street Journal reported that Noem and Lewandowski were traveling together on the plane. DHS is reportedly using money meant for the Trump administration’s self-deportations program to lease the plane and is in the process of buying it outright for $70 million. The taxpayer-funded aircraft, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted Wednesday, has “a queen-size bedroom” and a “deluxe” bar. “A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Raskin remarked.

During the same congressional oversight hearing, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) referenced “reports of a romantic relationship between” Noem and Lewandowski and asked Noem if she had “sexual relations” with Lewandowski during her time at DHS. Noem called the allegation “tabloid garbage”; she and Lewandowski, who are both married, have previously denied being romantically involved with each other. Public tittering over the situation reached a crescendo last month when the Daily Show dubbed the 737 “a taxpayer-funded fuck plane,” though no evidence has emerged of anyone actually having sex on the jet.

Noem told lawmakers last week that she had only been on the plane “once.” And she said the plane was being used by other administration officials, though she didn’t name them.

On Friday, Axios reported that Noem and Lewandowski loaned the jet to First Lady Melania Trump, “who used it on several flights from D.C. to New York.” The plane last flew from DC to New York City on March 1, and Melania Trump spoke to the United Nations Security Council the next day. The White House did not respond to questions about the First Lady’s reported use of the plane.

Noem has also asserted that the plane is being “refurbished” to transport detainees.

That claim has drawn derision. A sales brochure says the aircraft—a Boeing BBJ Max 8—“caters to the most discerning of travelers, offering an exquisite flying experience like no other,” and notes that in addition to the bedroom and bar, it includes showers, a kitchen, and four large flat-screen TVs. That would create an unusually sumptuous set-up for deportees who DHS has sometimes shackled on flights.

“What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom?” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked Noem last Tuesday.

Typical 737 Max 8s have between 162 and 178 seats, according to Boeing’s technical specs. The brochure for the 737 Max 8 Boeing Business Jet that Noem has used says the aircraft has a passenger capacity of just 17 people. The department has said it plans to add seats by eliminating “at least one of the bedrooms.” On the evening of March 4, after Noem testified before the Senate, the luxury jet flew from New York City to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where there is a facility for modifying jets.

“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to buy a deportation plane in the first place?” Raskin asked at the House hearing. “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce to turn into a Metro bus.”

Other details suggest the plane is primarily intended for high-level passengers. Last year, it received a new registration number: N471US—note the 47. (The Federal Aviation Administration allows aircraft owners to pick their own registration number.) The plane also got a new paint job and design scheme similar to the 47th president’s proposal for Air Force One.

DHS did not respond to a question about when Noem or other DHS employees used the plane. But Mother Jones and Project On Government Oversight found that the jet flew to Amman, Jordan, on December 15 and left the next day. Noem was in Amman meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on December 16, according to his office.

The plane flew to Bermuda on January 14 and to the Dominican Republic on January 15. Other flight records since December show it going to the closest major airport to Mar-a-Lago, and to various other domestic locations. It’s not clear if Noem or any other administration officials were on those flights.

Walters—the former head of a State Department unit called the Bureau of Medical Services that helped to evacuate personnel in emergencies—left government service in 2021 and later emerged as a vocal Trump supporter. In the fall of 2024, he spoke out in support of Trump’s immigration agenda and received an award from the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

After leaving the State Department, Walters launched a series of businesses. Following Trump’s election, his firms began seeking federal contracts to help implement the president’s plan to deport millions of people.

Those contractors all seem to be headquartered in a few suites alongside a cluster of other related firms in a nondescript office building in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. We found over two dozen companies there that list either Walters or two of his former State Department colleagues—with whom he now works—as registered agents.

One company in that building is Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, which owns the luxury 737 being leased to DHS. That firm, incorporated last August in Delaware, does not list its ownership or the people who run it. But the FAA’s website shows that the company shares an office suite with Soterex Financial Services, a Walters-run company. Journalist Gillian Brockell previously reported that Valkyrie Aviation is in the same building as the Walters-linked companies, among other ties.

None of the companies responded to queries, and we were unable to access the offices when we attempted to visit the Arlington building.

For the rest of the story, head over to Mother Jones or POGO Investigates.

Yesterday, Will Sytsma with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop and I published this deep dive over at POGO Investigates:

From Minneapolis to San Antonio, DC to Los Angeles, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been quick to claim that people have assaulted or impeded its agents.

In fiscal year 2025, DHS sent a record number of referrals to federal prosecutors proposing charges under 18 U.S.C. 111, according to previously unreported data analyzed by POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW). In the federal criminal code, Section 111 makes it illegal for anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes” with federal law enforcement agents, or former agents, while they are engaged in or because of their official duties.

POGO and IRW’s review sheds new light on the extent of DHS’s role in driving a wave of alleged assault and interference prosecutions. At least two dozen of these claims that have gone to court were later dismissed by prosecutors, resulted in not-guilty verdicts, or were even rejected by grand juries, as federal data and previous in-depth examinations have shown.

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Federal prosecutors received 274 formal referrals from DHS in fiscal year 2025 where Section 111 was the lead charge, according to the government data, which was obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

That’s the highest in any year since the department was created. It’s about twice as high as the next highest, fiscal year 2019.

A notable increase began in late February 2025, with about 77% of fiscal year 2025’s referrals occurring in its last six months, ending on September 30. Several factors could have influenced this increase, including the higher number of agents on patrol in the streets as part of DHS’s nationwide immigration enforcement operations and the protests stemming from agents’ presence in cities across the country.

In a written statement to POGO and IRW, a DHS spokesperson attributed the spike to increased violence against its agents.

“It should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement,” the spokesperson said. “ICE officers are facing a 1300% increase in assaults, a 3200% increase in vehicle attacks and an 8000% increase in death threats against them.” (Publicly available data does not appear to back up DHS’s statistical claims about assault.)

“There are myriad factors that affect the outcome of any given prosecution,” the DHS spokesperson said, regarding why there are dozens of cases resulting in dismissals or not guilty verdicts, adding that “the fact remains that anyone who assaults one of our officers is committing a felony, and anyone who obstructs them is committing a federal crime.”

DHS referred POGO and IRW to the Justice Department for questions on specific cases. A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about the cases and the broader surge. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, recently posted on X that the failure of cases in Los Angeles are the result of “Mass judge and jury nullification, deep in blue territory, of slam-dunk assault cases against federal law enforcement.”

DHS encompasses several law enforcement components, but the lion’s share of DHS referrals has come from ICE. Out of all DHS referrals where Section 111 is the lead charge, ICE was the source of 126, up from 28 in fiscal year 2024, according to the Justice Department data.

This surge isn’t going unnoticed. In a December presentation, the National Lawyers Guild, which trains activists and legal observers, called Section 111 “the Government’s Offense of Choice” to silence dissent toward its immigration operations.

The spike in cases from the last half of fiscal year 2025 is just the beginning.

In the last days of the fiscal year, Trump administration officials put pressure on agencies to prosecute these cases. On September 25, the White House issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which cites Section 111. It directs DHS, the Justice Department, and two other departments to be expansive in the investigations and prosecutions of people who interfere with ICE, citing “terroristic conspiracies” and “organized political violence.” On September 29, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors to prioritize charging people interfering with ICE operations under Section 111.

Citing the resignations of prosecutors, like those in Minnesota reportedly under pressure to charge protestors with assault before adequate evidence has been collected, former Justice Department ethics attorney Jesselyn Radack said she believes prosecutors are being pressed to prosecute cases they have problems with. In some of those, Radack says it is likely they “are being overridden by superiors who are under greater institutional political pressure.”

Prosecutors who are weaponizing the justice system are prioritizing their fealty to the president over their bar licenses — and more significantly, over the oath they took to protect and defend the Constitution,” commented Radack.

Experts say prosecuting cases that lack merit puts people’s rights at risk, including their First Amendment rights to monitor government actions and protest, and can wrongly force people to defend charges that should not have been brought.

“We’re seeing a systematic policy directed against civilians to stop them from observing government activity, which is unconstitutional,” said David Bier, an immigration policy expert with the Cato Institute, who focused on impacts on First Amendment rights in a recent post. “It’s a threat to the rights of every American.”

Unsubstantiated charges can also undermine the rights of immigrants.

In one assault case in Texas where a judge said that an ICE agent’s injury was “self-inflicted” and another engaged in “blatant misstatements,” the judge wrote that charges can be used by the government to short-circuit the due process rights of undocumented immigrants with no prior criminal histories to arrest them without warrants. Allowing dubious charges to stand in for immigration arrest warrants would tempt agents, “under the pressure of ever-increasing quotas, to cut constitutional corners,” the judge wrote.

That’s not the only case where the accuracy of DHS agents’ claims has been in question.

In January, DHS claimed in a press release that Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis and two others resisted and violently assaulted an ICE agent in Minneapolis, leading the agent to shoot Sosa-Celis in the leg. Sosa-Celis and another person were charged under Section 111, and for aiding and abetting each other’s alleged assault and interference of the ICE agent.

Yet, earlier this month, prosecutors moved to dismiss the case, writing that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent” with claims made to justify bringing the charges.

“A joint review by ICE and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a February 13 statement. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation. … The U.S. Attorney’s Office is actively investigating these false statements.”

For the rest of the story, head on over to POGO Investigates.

Originally published at POGO Investigates.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has launched a review of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) processes for handling whistleblower reprisal complaints, according to a government email obtained by POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight.

According to the email, the GAO, which is Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog arm, is requesting interviews with DHS whistleblowers who filed complaints between October 1, 2017, and September 30, 2025. That period covers most of President Donald Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s term, and the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

A GAO spokesperson confirmed the review and told POGO Investigates it does not yet have an estimated date of completion. The review, according to the GAO spokesperson, was requested by the ranking members of the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees, who are, respectively, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Senator Gary Peters (D-MI).

“The purpose of these interviews is to hear your firsthand perspectives about the whistleblower retaliation complaint and investigation process and how, if at all, whistleblower protections were communicated to you,” the email states. “We are also interested in hearing about your experiences reporting the underlying allegation of wrongdoing.”

The email says GAO will not “reassess” cases. Rather, it is seeking “complainants’ experiences with these processes to give us contextual background and help inform our review.”

GAO reviews normally result in a public report, such as a 2012 report on the Pentagon’s military whistleblower reprisal program, and often contain recommendations for improvements.

“DHS is committed to transparency and looks forward to explaining the lawfulness of its actions,” a DHS spokesperson told POGO in an email. The spokesperson provided no further information, and did not identify what actions they were referring to.

According to the email, GAO “would like to talk with people whose whistleblower retaliation allegations were investigated by DHS’s Office of Inspector General or the Office of Special Counsel — or whose appeals were heard by the Merit Systems Protection Board.”

The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) are official government venues for civilian executive branch employees to file whistleblower reprisal complaints. The DHS OIG also can receive reprisal complaints from DHS contractor employees and uniformed members of the U.S. Coast Guard. (The author of this article formerly worked at OSC nine years ago.)

Two former DHS contractor employees named Barry Angeline and Dan McCabe criticized the DHS OIG’s handling of whistleblower complaints in a December opinion piece in the Washington Examiner.

“From fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2025, the Office of Inspector General’s Whistleblower Protection Division reviewed 3,144 retaliation complaints. It confirmed just 11 — a validation rate of 0.35%,” Angeline and McCabe wrote. “Other federal watchdogs corroborate 3%–8% of retaliation cases.”

“That makes the Office of Inspector General between ten and 25 times less likely to confirm retaliation than comparable federal offices,” they wrote.

Sixty-six percent of DHS employees responding to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey in 2024 said they could “disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal.” That is somewhat lower than the government-wide score, which was 72% in 2024. The Trump administration canceled the survey last year.

POGO has previously reported on the DHS OIG’s handling of a whistleblower alleging reprisal and politicized intelligence during the first Trump administration.

The DHS OIG and MSPB did not respond to requests for comment. OSC declined to comment.

Yesterday, working with Luisa Clausen and Aarushi Sahejpal with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, I published a deep, data-driven investigation into the top companies contracting with ICE at POGO Investigates:

In the first full year of President Donald Trump’s second term, many of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) top contractors saw massive year-over-year increases in the money they are making from the agency, according to a POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight, and Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) analysis of federal contracting data.

Many of these companies or their executives have made significant political donations, lobbied on a law that is massively boosting ICE’s budget, hired former ICE officials, or sometimes all of the above.

“They are simply relying on good-old shoulder rubbing,” said Nancy Hiemstra, a Stony Brook University professor who co-authored the book Immigration Detention Inc. with Deirdre Conlon, referring to the ICE contractors. She says these tactics can gain the companies favored treatment by government officials, whose attitude may be, according to Hiemstra, “‘Hey, I know you, wink wink, I’ll throw this contract at you.’”

Four of the top 10 ICE contractors have seen their ICE revenues more than triple compared to the last year under President Joe Biden. Acquisition Logistics, the ICE contractor ranked third in terms of agency revenue, has never previously contracted with the agency. Four of these 10 companies, their corporate political action committees, or their executives donated hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in total sums to Trump-aligned PACs during or after the 2024 campaign, or to Trump’s inauguration committee. Two of the 10 — CSI Aviation and Palantir Technologies — saw their ICE revenue more than triple, and their executives were a source of significant political contributions.

An ICE spokesperson told POGO and IRW in an email that the agency executes its “mission with the highest standards of integrity and transparency” and follows “the law to the letter in our contracting practices,” basing its contract awards “on mission requirements, contractor performance, and value to the taxpayer.”

Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and contracting expert, said the huge contracting growth for some of these companies that have donated could be a red flag.

“When the connection between giving Trump money and getting contracts is so direct and clear, you are not talking about inefficiency or waste anymore,” Tiefer said. “You are talking about corruption.”

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Whether there’s a relationship between political contributions and contracts is an issue that’s long been on the national radar. One 2023 peer-reviewed academic study found “company donations somewhat increase the risk of favoritism in government contracting, while big donations to the party of the president substantially increase these risks, especially when the awarding agency is highly politicized (i.e., least insulated from the president).” And ICE, during this administration, is very much at the center of one of the White House’s top priorities.

Experts have argued, even if it’s hard to make a direct causal connection, that contributions may help companies maintain or gain access to policymakers in Washington. The Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that getting greater access, on its own, is legal.

One example of a company raising such questions around contracts and political contributions is Palantir Technologies, whose data analytics capabilities are helping ICE identify immigrants to arrest. Palantir saw its top officials contribute millions of dollars.

In December 2024, the month after the election, Palantir CEO Alex Karp gave $1 million to the Super PAC MAGA, Inc. and then another $1 million to the Trump inauguration committee, even though Karp had previously donated to Kamala Harris’ campaign. Overall, Karp and his then-senior advisor Jacob Helberg (who is now a Trump administration official) donated a total of nearly $3.9 million to Trump-aligned PACs and Trump’s inauguration. Palantir has also donated an unknown amount of funds towards the White House’s East Wing ballroom project, according to a donor list provided by the White House.

Now ranked 10th, Palantir’s revenue from ICE increased 297% from the year before Trump’s second inauguration, ballooning to $81.1 million. (Palantir has also seen its federal contracts boom over the last year across the government.)

“We’re very proud of our growing work with the U.S. government,” a Palantir spokesperson told POGO and IRW in an emailed statement, noting that the company’s commercial business has been growing faster than its government work overall. The spokesperson did not address questions about contributions.

ICE’s Number One Contractor

The company with the highest amount of ICE contract revenue is Albuquerque, New Mexico-based CSI Aviation, which provides ICE with both domestic flights and international removal flights.

The company provides an example where political spending, lobbying, hiring former ICE employees, and skyrocketing ICE revenue are all present. Chief Executive Officer Allen Weh, along with his wife and daughter, also CSI corporate officers, contributed a total of $460,000 to Trump’s 2024 campaign. The company also hosted a campaign rally for Donald Trump days before the 2024 election.

Their support appears to have paid off. In the year since Trump was inaugurated, CSI Aviation has seen its revenues rise by 238% compared to the year before, going from $363.9 million to $1.23 billion.

R. Crawford Moore, CSI Aviation’s corporate counsel, said in an email that “nothing could be further from the truth” in response to any suggestion that political donations and activities have anything to do with the company’s work with ICE, partly because the company was providing services to DHS during the Biden administration.

Moore also said that CEO Weh’s political giving to Trump also occurred in the 2016 presidential election cycle when the company was not providing services to DHS (CSI would, however, later provide services to ICE in Trump’s first term).

“While he keeps politics and business separate, he makes no apologies for his support and admiration for the current president, and for what he has accomplished to enhance the Republic we are all blessed to live in,” said Moore, referring to Allen Weh.

In addition to political giving, CSI, along with ICE detention contractors GEO Group and CoreCivic, disclosed lobbying on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law triples ICE’s annual budget, making it the most lavishly funded law enforcement agency in the United States. The latter two companies have also lobbied on the homeland security spending bill for fiscal year 2026 and issues related to ICE.

For the rest of the story, head over to POGO Investigates.

On Sunday, John Sopko — the well-known former special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction — posted on social media, “The growing number allegations of misconduct by DHS employees in Minnesota and elsewhere raises an obvious question. What is DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari doing?”

Good question. Lawmakers have been trying for at least half a year to prod Cuffari to investigate a growing and staggering number of questionable, often shocking, use of force incidents arising from aggressive ICE and Border Patrol operations.

On June 11, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey sent a pointed letter to Cuffari about these operations in their home state of Massachusetts, stating: “ICE agents appear to have used increasingly aggressive tactics against community members who pose no threat, including psychological and physical coercion, obfuscation of agent identities and refusal to provide identification upon request, targeting of sensitive locations, and dragnet arrests that sweep in individuals who are not targets, including even U.S. citizens.”

As you may recall, in June, DHS began focusing on the Los Angeles area, which saw even more of what happened in Massachusetts.

In October, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote to Cuffari asking him and the acting Justice Department inspector general to launch a joint investigation into use of force and DHS agent conduct and tactics in light of their aggressive deployments in Chicago. They rejected doing a joint investigation. Cuffari also wouldn’t confirm to Duckworth whether there were any ongoing use of force investigations by his office.

Duckworth followed up with another letter a few weeks back reiterating her request, and met with Cuffari on January 29.

“IG Cuffari was clear that his office has the experience, expertise and most importantly, independence, to conduct investigations into all use of force incidents—including regularly investigating Border Patrol and ICE use of force,” Duckworth said in a statement. “If IG Cuffari is as serious about the need for independent investigations as he told me he is, then he must put his words into action. That’s what this moment demands and what the American people deserve.”

Warren and Markey (and 39 other lawmakers) wrote another letter today. They noted the extreme lack of urgency Cuffari’s office has shown in response to their June request: “Seven months later, after a slew of reports of brutal ICE raids throughout the country, on January 8, 2026, the OIG announced a new audit to ‘determine whether ICE investigates allegations of excessive use of force and holds personnel accountable in accordance with applicable Federal laws, DHS policies, and ICE directives.’” (Italics mine.)

That timing is also noteworthy because Cuffari’s office announced this use-of-force review — which had been sought seven months earlier — on the day after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good. Coincidence?

I’ve only scratched the surface. There have been many other lawmakers calling on Cuffari to investigate DHS use of force and concerning tactics over the last year (such as here, here, here, here, and here).

A few weeks back, on January 14, Cuffari released his "Major Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security."

There's no mention of "use of force" or "conditions of detention” in ICE detention centers where there were more deaths than in any other year since 2004 — and we’re on track to break that record this year.

At the start of Trump’s second term a year ago, he fired most inspectors general at the major federal agencies, even other watchdogs Trump appointed in his first term, but not Cuffari.

A month prior to Trump’s 2024 election win, a years-long federal investigation led by another Trump appointee concluded. That investigation found Cuffari lacked the independence expected of inspectors general and that he repeatedly misled Congress. Five inspectors general overseeing this investigation recommended in an October 2024 letter to the White House that Cuffari face discipline up to and including firing him. The Biden White House dithered and took no action, and many have told me that no action was taken because of a fear that Trump would use Cuffari’s firing to justify firing other IGs. Well, Cuffari was left alone and Trump mass fired the watchdogs anyway.

So here we are.

Replying to Sopko’s post on Sunday, the former CIA Inspector General David Buckley — a decades-long friend of Cuffari’s — wrote, “I concur, John Sopko. I am waiting to hear some big news from Joe Cuffari and wonder where his last SAR is (not on website).”

The “SAR” is the semiannual report covering six-month periods that all inspectors general are required by law to put out. Cuffari’s SARs tend to come out much later compared to virtually all other inspectors general. We still don’t have his March 2025 through September 2025 semiannual report — the first one to fully cover the Trump 2.0 administration — even though the Pentagon, Justice, Veterans Affairs, EPA, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and other watchdog offices have theirs out.

It’s a report that can tell us if Cuffari is launching probes, how many whistleblower complaints are coming in, and if his office is running into interference from DHS.

We are still waiting.

Updated to note that the letter that went out today was also signed by 39 other lawmakers and the timing of Cuffari’s announcement of a review was the day after an ICE agent killed Renee Good.

Update #2: Two days after I published this post, on February 5, Cuffari’s office released a public list of their “Ongoing DHS OIG Projects Related to Immigration Enforcement.” The DHS OIG placed this prominently on their home page:

As almost anyone paying attention knows, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7. Also last week, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot two people in Portland, Oregon. These high-profile recent incidents have added to widespread criticism that there’s excessive use-of-force by federal agents involved in the administration’s immigration crackdown. The highest levels of government – including President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – stridently defended the agents’ shootings. In the case of Good, within hours of the shooting, Noem accused Good of engaging in “an act of domestic terrorism,” claiming she tried to ram her vehicle into Ross, despite video contradicting Noem’s claim.

Yet beyond the support of top political leaders of use of force by Ross and ICE and Border Patrol agents broadly, there are other reasons why agents who use violence in public may not be found to have violated government policies, or face discipline for their acts.

This new investigation by my colleagues and me probes these issues that go beyond the current administration. As Christy Lopez, a former Obama-era Justice Department official who has reviewed alleged abuses by police departments, told me regarding the vast instances of federal agents’ violent tactics caught on film over the last year: “What they’ve been allowed to get away with in the past sort of set the benchmark for what’s appropriate.”

About 30 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico Border, the U.S. Border Patrol’s Ajo Station sits between the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation and a bleak desert area known as the Growler Valley. Due to the dangers presented by the rugged terrain and high temperatures, this Arizona station is often crowded with people who have crossed the border illegally, some of whom have voluntarily turned themselves in to the Border Patrol. Border Patrol Reddit threads suggest it’s not necessarily considered a desirable station for agents, often commuting hours to and from work every day. However, some agents believe that due to the remoteness of this station, it can be a good place to gain experience quickly, such as with tracking in the desert, seizing drugs, and processing people, to fast-track a career at the Border Patrol, a part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Indeed, the current chief of the Border Patrol, Mike Banks, was acting patrol agent in charge at the Ajo Station about a decade ago. The current deputy chief patrol agent of the El Centro Sector, Daniel Parra, who has been instrumental in CBP operations in Los Angeles and Chicago over the last year, also was a deputy agent in charge of operations at the Ajo Station at one point in his career.

Ajo Station is part of the Tucson Sector, one of the most violent sectors in the agency. While the Border Patrol claims that assaults from migrants are a frequent and exceptional danger to its officers, the Project On Government Oversight’s (POGO) analysis of agency incident data over the last four fiscal years shows there are about twice as many use-of-force incidents as there are assaults.

Tucson Sector agents have used force in proportion to assaults on agents at a 33% higher rate than the Border Patrol average, and at the second highest rate of all 20 Border Patrol sectors. (The highest is the El Centro Sector, where Parra is second in command to Greg Bovino, who has been in charge of CBP operations in Los Angeles and Chicago over the last year.)

The Ajo Station made national headlines in 2023 when agents shot and killed Raymond Mattia, both a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation. It’s unclear if those agents have been disciplined internally. Only a few months earlier, an incident happened inside a holding cell in Ajo Station, caught on camera, seen by witnesses, and resulting in a man needing medical attention. When faced with the possibility of criminal charges, the agent chose to resign less than two years after the incident.

These two incidents — one widely reported, in the field, and still being litigated, the other never reported by the media, inside a Border Patrol facility, and resulting in disciplinary action — offer insights about the state of accountability and the culture around it within the agency.

At a moment when CBP is conducting high-profile operations in cities across the country, new documents and data, obtained by POGO through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and examined alongside American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, shed light on an agency where agents are rarely held accountable for violent tactics in the field.

Records detailing an investigated use-of-force incident — including text messages and interviews with multiple Border Patrol agents — offer a window into how some Border Patrol agents discuss use of force in one of the agency’s most violent sectors, and accountability when agents are accused of going too far.

Agents’ text messages seemingly describe their view that it’s easier to justify violence outside the confines of government detention centers. Use of force incidents beyond the walls of a Border Patrol station can be situations more akin to the killing of Mattia months later in 2023, agents’ actions in U.S. cities over the last year like last week in Portland, Oregon, and numerous, often deadly instances involving migrants.

CBP acknowledged POGO’s questions sent in writing multiple times but did not provide any comment.

“Can’t let them run over us”

In the late afternoon of January 21, 2023, Border Patrol agent Jonathan Nathaniel Santiago was working a processing shift in the Ajo Station. “Processing” is where migrants who were traveling in the area and detained by Border Patrol are held as the agency determines where they need to be taken next. The people held in processing are rarely held by CBP for long periods of time, as opposed to ICE detention centers, where people can be held for years.

While seated at his desk, records indicate Santiago noticed a man from Mexico, whose name is redacted, standing next to the window of a crowded holding cell, near the cell’s door. According to a memo Santiago filed with his agency, he told the man to sit down twice — once with his hand and once in Spanish — after approaching the cell and opening the door. Santiago alleged that the man “laughed in his face.”

Santiago, an amateur Muay Thai fighter and 25 at the time, proceeded to physically “assault” the man by violently shoving him, according to investigative records. After the incident with Santiago, the man in the cell went to a camera and lifted “his shirt several times and touches his chest” where he said Santiago struck him. He was eventually taken to Banner University Medical Center South in Tucson and diagnosed with a chest wall contusion. Medical records indicate he “likely had a hairline rib fracture.”

The investigation into Santiago’s acts was led by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the agency’s internal affairs arm. OPR’s report of investigation includes numerous interviews with witnesses, text message exchanges from the days and weeks that followed, medical records, correspondence between a federal prosecutor and Santiago’s attorney, Santiago’s internet search history during and after his shift, and more.

CBP generally redacted Santiago’s name in 1,356 pages of records that CBP provided to POGO. However, his full name was unredacted once in those records, and his last name went unredacted elsewhere on four other occasions. Attempts by POGO to reach Santiago were unsuccessful.

One agent interviewed by OPR said they were “unaware of the existence of any established laws or policies that prohibit an individual from standing in a holding cell, if they are not creating a disturbance.” Another mentioned he didn’t “mind them standing at the windows because there is normally a lot of people in the cells.”

An agent who witnessed the incident told OPR that Santiago was “hot headed” and told Santiago to report the incident to his supervisor, and to “swallow your pride, you can’t be doing that here.”

During the Biden administration, CBP’s OPR expanded with hundreds of new hires amid a push for greater accountability. The expansion is brought up in the text exchanges between agents who also appear to be Border Patrol union stewards.

“Lot of new opr folks. Can’t let them run over us,” one agent texts the group. (All text messages are quoted as written, including misspellings and grammatical errors.)

A text message to Santiago reveals how one Border Patrol agent viewed the likelihood of serious discipline: “I think you’ll be good dude maybe a minor slap on the wrist or whatever.”

The story continues and can be found in full at POGO Investigates.

Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) spearheaded a letter signed by seven other lawmakers and sent to the top watchdogs at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. The letter asked them to “investigate the nature of the ties between DHS and DoD immigration contractors and Trump officials, whether officials have improperly assisted such companies in securing government contracts, and whether they have bypassed the standard procurement process to do so.”

The lawmakers wrote they “are concerned that some contractors are potentially receiving lucrative, no-bid contracts because of their close ties to high-level Trump administration officials.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told Bloomberg that “instead of chasing straw men,” the Democratic lawmakers, “should join the American people in supporting the President’s agenda to deport criminal illegal aliens.”

Regular readers here know these matters have been a major focus of mine this year. Along with other reporting, five of my stories were cited by the letter, all of which broke exclusive new information. They are:

Private Prison Giant Hired ICE Detention Chief

Meet the ICE Contractor Running Deportation Flights

Stephen Miller’s Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir

Gold Rush: Top Trump Officials’ Silicon Valley Ties

Border Czar's Former Clients Cash In On Trump's Immigration Crackdown

Other congressional oversight letters earlier this year have cited my work, such as this one in May by ranking members on the House Homeland Security Committee, another May letter from Senator Dick Durbin, and this one in October by 11 Senate Democrats.

At Mother Jones, I have a new piece out with Dan Friedman and Russ Choma examining companies that previously hired Tom Homan as a consultant — and which are now hitting paydirt after Trump made Homan the White House’s Border Czar. Here’s the top of the piece…

Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts.

Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door.

“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”

Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions. Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration.

Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration.

Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts.

In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”

In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.

Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.

Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s continued influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said.

Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns.

For the full story, head over to MoJo…

In June, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem issued a directive requiring her sign-off on any department obligations above $100,000. Since then, several contract awards have seemingly skirted that obstacle.

Once in August and again in September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made contract awards of $99,999 related to law enforcement training to Team Carney, a management consulting company.

September also saw the Secret Service award MacGyver Solutions with $99,999.99 for Polaris 1000 all-terrain vehicles, the Border Patrol award $99,999.96 to Quantico Tactical for “chemical munitions,” and ICE award Impres Technology Solutions with $99,999.98 for information technology to enable “AI-driven analytics,” among other capabilities.

In October, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services inked a deal with Palantir Technologies for $99,999.99 for just over a month of work “to implement phase 0 of the vetting of wedding-based schemes (VOWS) platform.”

While the value of these DHS contracts is relatively low, that foot in the door for Palantir at the early stage of this project could grow into a more lucrative opportunity, as agencies often award incumbent contractors with continuing work. “A 1 month phase for $100k let’s see what it turns into,” wrote one social media commentator who focuses on Palantir and who flagged that October 28 award.

And there are five other contract awards by DHS components since August that fit the pattern of falling between $99,999 and $99,999.99. All of these contracts fall within one dollar below the threshold set by Noem in her June directive.

There are no other DHS contract awards falling in this range this year prior to August, according to the Project On Government Oversight’s (POGO) analysis of federal data. The months before September 30 are a particularly busy time for federal agencies to award contracts before funding for the fiscal year expires.

Moreover, stretching back to the beginning of fiscal year 2016 — October 1, 2015 — DHS components have only made seven other awards in this range, according to the data at USAspending.gov. That’s a period encompassing parts of or the entirety of the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and second Trump administrations.

Out of 18 DHS contract awards falling between $99,999 and $99,999.99 that were made over this period of just more than a decade, 11 — over half — have occurred in the last few months.

Five of the 11 are from ICE, and one is from the Border Patrol — two agencies at the center of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

“These contracts were for routine operational needs,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told POGO. “Under Secretary Noem’s leadership, DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars — saving taxpayers more than $13.2 billion in her first 7 months.”

“Her contract policy works, clearly,” McLaughlin said.

While DHS under Noem has claimed significant savings, the department obligated $171.2 billion in taxpayer dollars in fiscal year 2025 — that’s about $30 billion more than fiscal year 2024.

Noem’s June policy, first reported by Federal News Network, requires that DHS “requests for approval of obligations above the $100,000 threshold must be submitted via memo through the Executive Secretary process. As with any request for secretarial approval, please allow a minimum of five days for front office review.” The June directive dramatically lowered the review threshold from $20 million, set in May, and an earlier limit of $25 million from March.

This directive caused a backlog of “mission critical” contracts across the sprawling department awaiting her approval, including delays to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) contract awards, according to an August report in the New York Times. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about adverse impacts to the FEMA response to flash floods that hit Central Texas earlier this year, which claimed 138 lives, as well as post-hurricane recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

None of the 11 DHS awards between $99,999 and $99,999.99 were made by FEMA.

DHS has denied that Noem’s reviews have had any adverse impacts and has said her reviews have been fast. “Since taking office, Secretary Noem has reviewed more than 5,000 contracts and reviews all contracts within 24 hours,” DHS said in an August statement.

Regarding FEMA, McLaughlin told POGO that “since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025, FEMA is 126% faster on average in getting federal grant funding to states and communities that request it.”

Experts have warned that Noem’s personal involvement in DHS spending could increase ethical risks and conflicts of interest. Indeed, after a Naples, Florida-based political donor to Noem asked for her assistance, Noem “fast-tracked” FEMA funds to rebuild a pier in Naples that was damaged during a prior year’s hurricane, according to a ProPublica report.

Noem and McLaughlin have also faced accusations that a firm with ties to them, including McLaughlin’s husband, is benefiting from a $220 million DHS ad campaign contract through a subcontract. McLaughlin said she is recused, and DHS has said in a statement that the department “has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” DHS invoked “the ‘national emergency’ at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption,” according to ProPublica.

These instances, the ballooning number of contracts worth $99,999, and other matters previously reported by POGO lead to an emerging picture of DHS spending being significantly shaped by high-level administration directives. And given the big boost in DHS spending — especially to ICE — from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act over the next several years, the total value of DHS contracts will likely grow.

This story was originally published at the Project On Government Oversight.

A high-ranking and highly scrutinized Border Patrol official has presided over a disproportionate amount of use-of-force incidents, according to an analysis of federal data by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW).

Gregory Bovino, the chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector in California who has been in charge of the controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raids in Chicago and Los Angeles, has been leading federal agents accused of excessive violence against migrants, protestors, journalists, and others in these operations. A federal judge just last week said these agents’ use of force in Chicago “shocks the conscience.”

To justify their use of force, Bovino and other senior DHS leaders have cited assaults against federal law enforcement. It’s not a new argument for Bovino: He told congressional staffers in 2023 that “The use of force by agents when agents are assaulted does happen.”

But federal data from the last four fiscal years shows that — under Bovino’s leadership — Border Patrol agents in the El Centro Sector have used force far more often than they’ve faced assault. For every assault they’ve faced, El Centro agents have used force over 3.6 times, according to the data. Across the Border Patrol, use of force incidents outpace assaults on agents by just over a 2-to-1 ratio. But El Centro’s data reflects the highest ratio of use of force to assault of any Border Patrol sector in the nation, far higher than the other 19 sectors and the Border Patrol overall.

The federal data covers fiscal years 2022 through 2025, which ended on September 30, 2025. The government last updated the data on October 15. Sector-by-sector use of force and assault data is not readily available prior to fiscal year 2022.

During those four years, there were 300 incidents of agents using force out of the El Centro Sector and 83 incidents of assaults against agents, according to agency data. Across the Border Patrol as a whole, the data shows around 2,900 use of force incidents and nearly 1,400 assault incidents.

Even compared to the sector with the second-highest ratio of use of force to assault incidents, El Centro stands out. The Tucson Sector in Arizona has a ratio 33% higher than that of the Border Patrol as a whole, about 2.76 use of force incidents per assault incident.

The same pattern holds when analyzing use of force and assaults by the number of Border Patrol agents involved instead of the number of incidents; however, that analysis shows El Centro deviating even more from the rest of the agency. The ratio of El Centro Sector agents using force versus being assaulted (4.16 to 1) is more than double the Border Patrol-wide ratio (1.95 to 1).

POGO and IRW analyzed data derived from the system used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Border Patrol’s parent agency, for agents to report use of force and assaults.

This data sheds additional light on the track record of Bovino, whom DHS recently dubbed the Border Patrol’s “commander at large.” This analysis also comes as recent reporting says the administration plans to replace Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials with Border Patrol staff to further ramp up immigration arrests. Bovino has said, “we’re taking this show on the road to a city near you.”

DHS and agency spokespersons, as well as Bovino and Daniel Parra, Bovino’s deputy in El Centro who has also played a leading role in the Chicago and Los Angeles operations, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Bleed alongside them”

Bovino, who joined the Border Patrol in the 1990s, became chief of the El Centro Sector in April 2020. The sector stretches from a 70-mile section of the U.S.-Mexico border through Central California to the state’s border with Oregon. He has been in charge of that sector since then, except for a brief period in 2023.

Bovino has been one of the main faces of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. In Chicago and Los Angeles, he is often deployed on the ground with federal agents during operations. During a 2023 interview with congressional staffers, Bovino touted the “leadership by example from senior leadership in the El Centro Sector.” Describing the relationship of senior leadership with agents, he said, “as the saying goes, bleed alongside them, if you can.”

CBP policy allows for agents to use force when they fear that “violence” or “assault” could take place, or in other situations, such as when a person is trying to evade arrest or resisting an agent’s commands.

Bovino said during his 2023 congressional interview there are risks unique to agents in the El Centro Sector. He said smugglers and transnational criminal operations pose a threat to agents, and they encourage “the illegal aliens to assault agents, as well.”

He noted that these threats “include assaulting agents with the river water itself, which is highly polluted.”

Use of force by agents in response to assaults can be deadly, but the term also includes “less-lethal” actions. “Use of force” can include striking a person, such as kicking or punching, or using weapons like batons, tasers, guns, and pepper spray. It can involve agents using devices that immobilize moving vehicles and other tactics. Agency policy states that “the use of excessive force is unlawful and will not be tolerated.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security, it is generally mandatory for its law enforcement agents to report both assaults on agents and agents’ use of force, with the exception of “physical tactics or techniques that do not deliver a kinetic impact, such as [an] arm hold.”

“El Centro is an outlier”

An expert who reviewed the data from El Centro notes that it’s not just that the sector’s agents use of force outpaces assaults on agents. It also outpaces that of other sectors on the U.S.-Mexico border, when compared to the number of apprehensions. That measure — the number of reported use-of-force incidents per 100,000 apprehensions — shows that “El Centro is an outlier,” emailed researcher Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at the non-profit Washington Office on Latin America. Overall, he wrote, “No other sector *comes close* to El Centro in use-of-force incidents per apprehensions” (emphasis in original).

In fiscal year 2025, there were 410 use-of-force incidents per 100,000 apprehensions in El Centro — compared to 302 in the Laredo Sector, the next highest, according to Isacson, who analyzed this federal data after IRW and POGO reached out to him.

Isacson emailed that “In 2024 [the gap between El Centro and other sectors] was even more stark: 349 incidents per 100K apprehensions, the second-place sector, Big Bend, was 122.” Isacson found that El Centro also reported the most use-of-force incidents per 100,000 apprehensions in fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

“’Migrant apprehensions’ are a good measure of how busy a sector is overall,” said Isacson, who tracks accusations of Border Patrol misconduct. “If there’s an outsized number of use-of-force incidents being reported in a sleepy sector, that probably tells us a lot about the reigning organizational culture in that sector, how quick they are to escalate, and what kind of behavior agents get rewarded for.”

Of the nine Border Patrol sectors on the U.S.-Mexico border, El Centro ranks among the lowest when it comes to migrant apprehensions over the last four fiscal years, with significantly fewer than 100,000 apprehensions in each of those years unlike busier sectors that often have had significantly more.

Several El Centro agents’ use of force gained headlines during Bovino’s leadership in the sector. In the daylight on July 11, 2022, at least one Border Patrol agent fired around six shots into the driver’s and front sides of a minivan going down Highway 98, the Imperial Valley Weekly reported. The agent injured at least one person, according to the Weekly, and a Facebook photo published by the Calexico Chronicle shows the bullet-stricken van butted up against a tractor-trailer.

In a statement to the Weekly, a CBP spokesperson said the agent had attempted to stop the vehicle and that the driver failed to yield. CBP’s use of force policy reserves deadly force (including discharging a weapon) for times when an agent believes that a person poses an imminent danger of serious injury or death to themselves or another person.

Another case that year brought allegations of both a use of force and an assault on an agent. According to a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a Border Patrol agent in the El Centro Sector allegedly “violently assaulted” a migrant woman who had fled violence in El Salvador with three children and was seeking asylum. Border Patrol agents apprehended them near a train station in Calipatria, California, on February 14, 2022.

The woman claimed an agent punched her in the mouth, hit her stomach, and slammed her against a train. The agent claimed the woman assaulted him.

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against the woman and her then-18-year-old son, but according to the ACLU, months later the charges were “dismissed at the federal government’s request.” Federal agencies have previously declined to comment on the case.

“Turn and burn”

Data on reported apprehensions, use of force, and assaults in El Centro also revealed a shift in the last fiscal year: Agents are now reporting significantly more assaults than agents in other sectors. Isacson ran the numbers on reported assaults per apprehensions and found that El Centro’s numbers were in line with other sectors — until fiscal year 2025.

“Measured as a proportion of migrant apprehensions, reported assaults in El Centro are not unusual until 2025, when the El Centro Sector rises to double the rate of the second-place sector,” Isacson wrote.

“This does raise eyebrows since Bovino has been so quick to allege ‘assault’ in Los Angeles and Chicago, even in dubious cases where the supposed assailants are released without charges.”

Bovino took on a prominent role in the Trump administration’s “Operation At Large” in Los Angeles, which was accompanied by the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. In September, he told press that federal agents would “turn and burn“ until there are no immigrants left to target in that city.

The Los Angeles operation has been controversial both for the aggressive tactics used by agents and for accusations of stopping people on the basis of race. Federal agents’ use of force in and around Los Angeles has prompted criticisms from defense attorneys, Angelenos, experts, and advocates. The incidents include using explosive charges to blow down the front door on a home with children ages 1 and 6 inside when the person targeted was not present, and violently arresting a U.S. citizen filming masked federal agents smashing a window to forcibly remove someone out of a vehicle.

In the course of the operation, federal officials have also at times made false public statements about the threats they faced or shared claims in court that were either unsupported or contradicted by evidence. In one example, the Department of Homeland Security inaccurately claimed in a written online post that a U.S. citizen was “arrested because they ASSAULTED U.S. Border Patrol Agents.” Another such case involved Bovino as the only Border Patrol agent testifying that he witnessed another agent getting hit in the chest in Los Angeles in June. No video clearly evidenced Bovino’s claim, but video did show that other agent shoving the protester, who himself had been charged with a misdemeanor for assault and was later found not guilty.

In Chicago, where he has led “Operation Midway Blitz,” Bovino has faced pushback from media groups, journalists, and residents over his direction of federal agents and their use of force in response to protests. Plaintiffs in a court filing said Bovino has encouraged agents to use tear gas and pepper balls. They allege he personally threw tear gas “without justification“ in a filmed incident.

Bovino posted a video to Facebook on October 13 depicting agents using force against protesters with the hashtags #Chicago and #OpMidwayBlitz. The clips, edited into a montage with action-movie-style music, depict agents tackling, pushing, and holding protestors to the ground. The caption suggests the use of force is justified because the agents are under threat of assault.

“Interfering with our agents or operations will lead to consequences,” Bovino wrote in the post’s caption. “We support the right to protest, but public and agent safety is non-negotiable. Zero tolerance. The mission continues.”

In several high-profile incidents, allegations of improper use of force have been met with claims that agents were responding to assault. In one instance in Chicago, an agent allegedly rammed his SUV into a car then shot a woman five times after yelling “do something, b–tch.” DHS has publicly stated that instead “Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” The Justice Department is prosecuting the woman and another person, accusing them of “forcibly assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer.” Defense attorneys for the woman have accused the agent who shot her of destroying evidence, with prosecutors acknowledging that a CBP mechanic repaired the SUV and removed scuff marks.

A federal judge in Chicago has questioned agents’ tactics under Bovino’s leadership. On October 9, District Judge Sara Ellis temporarily ruled that federal agents could not use tear gas, pepper spray, or other weapons against journalists and protestors “who are not posing an immediate threat” after the media groups brought their complaint. Agents defied the order, using riot-control weapons on civilians at an October 25 Halloween Parade in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood, Ellis said in a court hearing.

In a November 4 deposition, Bovino said up through that date in Chicago “all uses of force that I’ve seen and all arrests that I’ve seen have been more than exemplary,” meaning agents used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission.” He said there have been “a whole myriad of violent actions that I see against law enforcement officers conducting a lawful law enforcement mission.”

Two days later, on November 6, Judge Ellis issued another order restricting use of force by federal agents under Bovino’s command. “I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” Ellis said. “I don’t find defendants’ version of events credible.”

DHS said it plans to appeal Ellis’s order.

This story was reported with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.

This story was co-authored with Dan Friedman.

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) handed a massive aviation contract, potentially worth nearly $1 billion, to a relatively new company with no federal contracting experience, following an opaque and seemingly hurried process.

The deal has sparked criticism from a rival contractor in a scathing lawsuit, and records obtained by Mother Jones reveal the extensive involvement of a senior DHS official who formerly worked with the winning company’s CEO. The lawsuit alleges the contract was “unlawful, rushed, and noncompetitive.” As the Trump administration pours billions of dollars into DHS for its crackdown on undocumented immigrations, the contract adds to a growing number of deals that have prompted questions about the integrity of DHS contracting.

The three-year deal to fly migrants back to their home countries went to Salus Worldwide Solutions, a company founded by a former State Department official named William Walters. Until early September, the DHS division overseeing the contract was run by Christopher Pratt, a former State Department colleague of Walters. The White House had nominated Pratt for a high-level position to serve as the State Department’s main liaison with the Pentagon, but pulled his nomination on September 29.

Internal DHS records seen by Mother Jones show that Pratt was involved in the contract award to Salus. In April, before the contract was awarded, Pratt scheduled DHS offsite meetings at Salus’s office, and he personally congratulated Walters after his company won the contract.

Neither Pratt nor Walters responded to questions.

The contract, worth up to $915 million, is for air operations to support the administration’s effort to persuade millions of undocumented immigrants to “self-deport,” a key plank in the Trump administration’s immigration policy. The White House calls the program “Project Homecoming.” Under it, immigrants who use a Customs and Border Protection app to self-deport are being offered a $1,000 “exit bonus” and free travel. This program is at least partially funded by money that Congress earmarked to provide foreign aid to help refugees, but which the Trump administration has repurposed for “self-deportations,” as Reuters previously reported.

It is hard to know how many people have so far accepted the offer. But if the plan takes off, this program could prove extremely lucrative for Salus, a firm that appears to have only a handful of employees and was launched in 2023 by Walters, a former Army medical officer. A federal contracting website describes Salus as a “Women Owned Business.” The company did not respond to questions about the basis for that claim, but on October 2, days after Mother Jones asked about it, Salus’ federal contractor registration was updated to remove that description.

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For the rest of the piece, check out the story at Mother Jones or at the Project On Government Oversight.

This story was co-authored with Russ Choma.

The company’s biometric tech always sounded like it was ripped from the plot of a dystopian thriller, but recently, the iris-scanning system developed by the Massachusetts-based BI² Technologies has become part of the nation’s deportation dragnet.

How BI² landed an ICE contract worth as much as $10 million is in part a tale of the Trump administration’s increasing reliance on controversial surveillance and biometric technology in its immigration crackdown. But it’s also the story of how a lobbying shop with deep ties to Trumpworld helped land a lucrative deal for a company that for years had struggled to break into federal contracting.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, BI² hired Ballard Partners to tout its tech to the right people in Washington. The lobbying firm was about as close as you could get to the Trump administration. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, helped open Ballard’s DC office. Attorney General Pam Bondi is a Ballard alum. And the firm’s founder, Brian Ballard, a Trump whisperer with unparalleled entree to the president’s inner circle, was part of the team working on the BI² account.

In August, Ballard’s lobbying paid off when ICE handed BI² a no-bid award for its Inmate Recognition and Identification System, saying it would give agents the “capability to quickly and accurately identify individuals encountered during ICE operations.” Equipped with an iris-scanning mobile app called MORIS, ICE agents can query the IRIS database, which contains some 5 million biometric records.

…

For the rest of the piece, check out the story at Mother Jones or at the Project On Government Oversight.

Years after 9/11 led to a huge shift in federal law enforcement resources towards counter-terrorism, I wrote an article in 2009 about the sharp drop-off in Pentagon fraud enforcement after defense spending had been surging for years in large part due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “No one is minding the store,” William G. Dupree, a former director of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, which investigates contracting fraud, told me back then.

Over the last few months, we’re seeing journalists and others note that there may be far less enforcement in critical areas — such as counterterrorism, human trafficking, white collar crime — because of the Trump administration’s rapid subsumption of law enforcement, military, and other government resources towards immigration enforcement.

I suspect the void left by this redirection of resources will be felt for a long time, and it will take years to document the impacts.

A few recent news articles and analyses detailing the shift in vast numbers of law enforcement and other personnel towards finding, arresting, and deporting immigrants — and the impacts of that shift…

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian:

President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out the “largest deportation program in American history” has reshaped federal law enforcement priorities and diminished efforts to fight domestic terrorism — including extremists who target children, according to sources and newly released federal data.

Roughly 20% of FBI agents — 2,840 out of around 13,800 — have been diverted to work on immigration enforcement, according to data obtained by the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute. That represents a significantly larger shift in FBI priorities than what happened after the 9/11 terrorism attacks, when 1,234 FBI criminal investigators were reassigned to counterterrorism efforts.

It’s one of the many consequences of FBI Director Kash Patel’s push to require agents to help round up undocumented immigrants, a mission not normally undertaken by the FBI.

The impacts have been significant. Nearly every agent on Baltimore’s domestic terrorism squad was reassigned this year to work full time on immigration enforcement, forcing them to walk away from investigations of a network of violent predators that targets and exploits children online, according to two former FBI officials directly familiar with the matter.

The Guardian’s Aaron Glantz, Bernice Yeung, and Noy Thrupkaew:

At DHS, Trump has ordered agents formerly dedicated to investigating and arresting human traffickers to focus on deporting immigrants. Current and former DHS staffers interviewed by the Guardian confirmed that these investigators’ day-to-day work has been broadly shifted toward deportations and away from investigating “major crimes” with “real victims”.

Wired’s Vittoria Elliot:

Immigration enforcement, according to one [State Depattment’s Diplomatic Security Service] DSS worker who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, is solidly outside the usual duties of DSS agents. They were surprised when they saw the press release and an accompanying video on the agency’s YouTube channel highlighting the service’s immigration work.

But two sources who spoke to WIRED say that participating in immigration enforcement is entirely new for the security service, which specializes in a narrow zone of law enforcement.

“We never do that, because it's not within our authority,” a current DSS employee says of previous agency actions. “It’s sort of like having IRS agents investigate espionage in NASA. They do not have legal authority to do so.” In February, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem deputized 600 of the more than 2,500 DSS officers “to help with arresting and deporting illegal immigrants,” according to a DHS press release.

Garrett Graff:

The reassignments are huge numbers. According to the CATO Institute, “This diversion is not a small part of many of these agencies. It includes one in five US marshals (650 of 3,892), one in five FBI agents (2,840 of 13,700), half of DEA agents (2,181 of 4,620), over two-thirds of the ATF (1,778 of 2,572), and nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigations (6,198 of 7,100).”

And it’s not just law enforcement. We’re seeing the Department of Defense detailing its own employees to serve ICE’s mission, and military lawyers dispatched to serve as civilian immigration judges and adjunct prosecutors in civilian courts — a move that is likely illegal, but certainly unprecedented and a dangerous blurring of the lines between civilians and the military. Other civilian agencies are also being assigned to help: CISA, the nation’s civilian cybersecurity agency, has sent scores of its staff to help, among other DHS components, as have more than 4,000 civilian personnel from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — an agency whose normal role is actually to help keep people in the country, not disappear them to foreign torture gulags. All told, it appears some 33,000 employees from OTHER federal agencies have been dispatched to help support ICE. Add in state and local police who work on various federal task forces that have also been reassigned to support ICE and there are over 42,000 people who have other jobs doing important and necessary work, that have been subsumed by ICE.

The centrist Niskanen Center’s Owen Tritt:

To meet its stated goal of one million deportations a year, the White House has redirected considerable federal manpower: at least 6,700 employees have been reassigned—or had their duties shifted—to support deportations and related investigations. The true number is almost certainly higher, because neither the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) nor the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), both known to have redeployed staff, have released detailed counts. The diversion of 6,700 federal workers to immigration comes at the expense of the enforcement of white-collar crime, national security, drug and firearms trafficking, tax compliance, and protecting children from exploitation.

According to anonymous sources cited by The New York Times, approximately 2,000 Department of Justice (DOJ) agents have been reassigned to support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in immigration enforcement efforts. This includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the US Marshals. Notably, the FBI is required to contribute 45% of the total–about 6.6% of its entire workforce.

The reallocation is even more pronounced in major urban field offices, where higher concentrations of migrants have led to a greater share of agents being diverted. In New York City, 8% of the agent workforce has been reassigned; in Los Angeles, the number is estimated to be 93 agents.

FBI field offices have reportedly directed agents to spend up to one-third of their time on illegal immigration-related work. They often serve as “force multipliers,” securing locations to enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to conduct raids.

In addition to those formally reassigned to DHS, other ATF agents have also been redirected from their primary responsibilities of investigating “criminal misuse of firearms and explosives, firearms trafficking, acts of arson, and the diversion of alcohol and tobacco products.” Some have reportedly been tasked with acting as “fugitive hunters” targeting undocumented immigrants.