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

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.

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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.

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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.

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Salus’ self-deportation operations stretch far and wide. A review of job postings shows the company and its subcontractor, BDR Strategic Services, have been hiring “facility enrollment managers” and “detainee support officers” near detention centers across the country. In a December court filing, Salus said it had dispatched two-person “enrollment management teams” to facilities to recruit migrants for the program. As of early July, its employees have entered at least 50 facilities across the country, according to a document that Walters shared. The company claims it has facilitated nearly 80,000 self-deportations.

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Salus has blamed the scrutiny in part on its corporate rivals. In a letter to Congress in April, Walters noted that these competitors control a far larger portion of the deportation industry than Salus does, and he argued that their dominance is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and increasing the amount of time immigrants spend in detention. “Between 2022 and 2025, four of those companies that have built their business around private detention centers and forced deportation flights, have received more than $7 billion in contract awards which is more than the next 43 ICE contractors combined,” he wrote.

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