Label: Analysis.

ICE vouched for its acting director’s ethics on Friday, 39 minutes before Burn the Playbook’s deadline, in a statement that never mentions the private prison company where he worked for eleven years [1]. David Venturella worked at GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison operators, from 2012 to 2023, The Hill reported [2]. We asked ICE about that, about the billions moving between the government and private detention companies, and about Medicaid data that ended up with Palantir. ICE answered with a biography, a slogan about “the worst of the worst,” a refusal to discuss its methods and a shot at a lawsuit it did not name.

ICE’s full statement

The Department of Homeland Security’s media office sent this on behalf of ICE at 4:21 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Oct. 23, answering questions we sent Tuesday, Oct. 20 [1]:

“David J. Venturella is a veteran immigration enforcement and homeland security official with more than 30 years of experience in federal law enforcement operations, border security and immigration policy. A longtime leader within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he previously served as director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, where he oversaw nationwide immigration enforcement initiatives, detention operations, and interagency coordination efforts focused on public safety and national security. The Acting ICE Director abides by all ethics requirements.

“From day one, DHS has remained singularly focused on removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the United States and is always evaluating the best methods to do so. These heinous criminals, once arrested, should be removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense. DHS is moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.

“ICE does not disclose the existence of investigative methods and techniques.

“This lawsuit is another attempt to obstruct President Trump’s agenda and the will of the American people.”

GEO Group, CoreCivic and Anduril received questions with the same deadline. CoreCivic’s public affairs office acknowledged the request on Oct. 20 and said it would follow up, but had not answered by publication. GEO Group and Anduril had not responded.

The director

ICE’s biography credits him with “more than 30 years of experience in federal law enforcement operations, border security and immigration policy” and names his turn running Enforcement and Removal Operations [1]. It never names GEO. DHS named him acting director in May to replace Todd Lyons, after Venturella had left GEO and rejoined ICE, Al Jazeera reported [3].

The agency’s entire answer on ethics is one sentence: “The Acting ICE Director abides by all ethics requirements.” It does not say which requirements, whether he signed a recusal or whether anyone granted him a waiver.

The fuller account came from Venturella himself, in a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He told her he had divested his GEO stock and had “fully recused himself from all contracts and obligations related to detention,” The Hill reported [2]. He also wrote that he had fully disclosed his GEO employment before he was hired [2]. Warren says that recusal has “key loopholes” [2]. We could not find his ethics agreement or a recusal memo in public records, and ICE’s answer pointed to neither.

The man running the agency that buys private detention spent eleven years at a company that sells it. ICE answered that question without once writing the word GEO.

The money

ICE says criminals should be “removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense,” and that DHS is moving to use “EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners” [1].

That paragraph is not new. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave The New York Times the same sentences in June, when DHS dropped most of its warehouse plan, Reason reported [11]. The same reporting said DHS also planned to buy detention centers from the private prison companies it already paid [11].

The partner in the filings is a private prison company. On July 2, DHS completed its purchase of two California prisons from CoreCivic: California City, 2,560 beds, for $732.6 million, and Otay Mesa, 1,994 beds, for $739.2 million [4]. That came to $1.5 billion gross and about $1.1 billion net to the company, CoreCivic told investors [4]. On Aug. 4, CoreCivic sold DHS two more, the Midwest Regional Reception Center for about $238.4 million and Prairie Correctional Facility for about $495.6 million [5]. Four prisons, 7,187 beds, roughly $2.2 billion in gross sale prices by our arithmetic from the filings. CoreCivic says it expects to keep running three of them under its existing ICE contracts, and it signed a new ICE contract to run the fourth, Prairie, which had sat idle since 2010 [4][5].

So the space is existing, in one case empty since 2010. Taxpayers bought it, and a private prison company runs it.

GEO has its own pipeline. Its 1,000-bed Delaney Hall in Newark holds a 15-year ICE contract that GEO told investors it expected to bring “in excess of $60 million in annualized revenues” in its first full year [6]. Over 2025, GEO’s ICE capacity grew “from approximately 20,000 beds to approximately 26,000 beds” [7]. GEO reported $254.4 million in net income for 2025, up from $32.0 million in 2024, on $2.63 billion in revenue. Most of that jump came from a $232.4 million pre-tax gain on selling assets. Strip out the one-time items and GEO says it earned $120.1 million, up from $101.0 million the year before [7].

Both companies gave to Trump’s inauguration, the inaugural committee’s federal filing shows: $500,000 from the GEO Group’s political action committee on Dec. 11, 2024, and $500,000 from CoreCivic on Dec. 19 [8]. ABC News first reported CoreCivic’s gift [9]. The record shows the gifts and the contracts side by side. It does not show a trade.

The line about existing space also arrives after ICE spent more than $700 million buying warehouses for detention earlier this year, the American Immigration Council reported [10]. DHS has since dropped most of those conversions, Reason reported, though ICE appears to be moving forward with four [11].

As for “the worst of the worst”: on July 11, 2026, ICE held 65,765 people, and 46,436 of them, 70.6 percent, had no criminal conviction, according to TRAC [12]. By that count, seven in ten people in ICE custody that day had no criminal conviction on record.

The Medicaid data

“ICE does not disclose the existence of investigative methods and techniques” [1].

The record on this one is already public, in federal court. In a July 16 filing in California v. HHS, the states attached ICE’s own production about Palantir, along with a declaration from a California deputy attorney general [13]. NPR reported the next day, under the headline “ICE shared Medicaid data it shouldn’t have with Palantir,” citing a declaration by California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich, that the government told the states the data had been shared over a Microsoft Teams chat and deleted from the chat [14]. Palantir told NPR “the dataset in question was purged pursuant to government instruction” [14].

ICE has put serious money into Palantir’s tools. On April 11, 2025, ICE added $29,898,236 to its order with the company for licenses and engineering to deploy “new targeting and enforcement prioritization, self-deportation tracking, and immigration lifecycle process capabilities,” then added the same amount again on Sept. 25, 2025, federal spending records show [15]. Nothing in those records ties the order to Medicaid data.

On Sept. 8, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, ruling on data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, wrote that “the policies at issue clearly do not justify ICE’s receipt or use of data from CMS on citizens, lawful permanent residents, and those with valid and unexpired visas” [16]. The same order says it “clearly permits” ICE to receive data on people who entered illegally and were released pending removal [16]. ICE may still use data for “legitimate criminal law enforcement objectives,” he wrote. “But the order does not allow data sharing en masse” [16]. The earlier restrictions stay in place until the new language is final [16]. On Oct. 16, the two sides told the court they “were largely unable to reach agreement,” and the government said it intends to notice another hearing [17].

The lawsuit ICE did not name

“This lawsuit is another attempt to obstruct President Trump’s agenda and the will of the American people” [1].

ICE did not say which lawsuit. Our questions covered its leadership, its detention contracts and Medicaid data. One pending case touches all three: California v. HHS, No. 3:25-cv-05536 in the Northern District of California, the Medicaid data case brought by California and other states [18]. ICE did not say that is the case it meant. “Obstruct” is ICE’s word. The judge’s words, so far, are that ICE’s policies “clearly do not justify” its receipt or use of that data on citizens and lawful residents [16].

Any new hearing will appear on that public docket, and anyone can read it [18].

ICE says it does not disclose its methods. Where its Medicaid data went is already in the federal court record.