"Revolving Door": Former GEO Group VP David Venturella Is New Interim ICE Chief

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

As Paul Barrett said, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, well, he officially resigned from the agency just about a year after his appointment to oversee Trump’s rapid expansion of nationwide ICE raids, immigration detention and deportations. Yesterday was Todd Lyons’s official last day heading up ICE , after he announced in April he’d be stepping down by the end of May. Lyons was never confirmed by the Senate. During his tenure, he repeatedly defended ICE’s tactics, even as the agency faced mounting scrutiny over its agents’ violent crackdown on protesters and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.

The man who continues to be ICE head today, who takes over from Lyons, Trump tapped David Venturella, a former ICE official, private prison executive, who was the vice president at GEO Group, to replace Lyons. Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding Venturella disclose more details about his ties to GEO Group, which, according to Public Citizen, saw its profits jump from $32 million in 2024 to more than $254 million last year, as the Trump administration expands government contracts with ICE jails nationwide. Senator Warren’s letter to Venturella said, in part, quote, “You worked at the GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor operating immigrant detention facilities across the U.S., for over a decade prior to joining ICE ; that history, and your reported use of DHS personnel and resources for personal or political favors, raise serious concerns about your ability to effectively serve as ICE’s leader, especially at a time when the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda is systematically violating fundamental human rights,” Senator Warren wrote.

For more, we’re joined by Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. Tell us more about who David Venturella is and what role GEO Group has played with the expansion of these for-profit private prisons around the country holding immigrants.

SETAREH GHANDEHARI : Good morning, Amy. Thanks for having me.

Yes, as you mentioned, David Venturella is an official who has basically been bopping in and out of ICE and GEO Group for decades now. He has served at ICE in the past under both the Bush and Obama administrations, spent time at GEO Group, for the past year has been an adviser, sort of a contractor with ICE , and is now going to be heading up the agency.

And, you know, in his role at GEO Group, he oversaw the contracts that GEO Group was negotiating and developing with ICE over the last couple of years, Delaney Hall being one of those contracts. That’s a relatively new detention facility that has opened over the last year or two. That one, along with several others that we had been keeping an eye on since the Biden administration, opened over the last couple of years and have been detaining people in ICE custody now under the Trump administration. And as your guests previously mentioned, the conditions at these facilities, like the conditions at detention facilities across the country, whether they’re run by GEO Group or one of the other private detention contractors or local or federal or state government, the conditions are horrendous. And Venturella has had sort of a really direct role in how all of this has developed over the last year, two years, specifically, but really decades.

AMY GOODMAN : I mean, it is very interesting that both Venturella and Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, who’s denying that immigrant detainees are on hunger strike, but then threatening to force-feed them, worked under Obama, President Obama.

SETAREH GHANDEHARI : Exactly. And this was — you know, just like we’re seeing now under President Trump with this campaign of mass detention and deportation, the Obama years was the last period of mass deportations that we saw. Your viewers may remember, he was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief” by many immigrant rights advocates. He oversaw a huge number of deportations during his tenure. And, of course, Venturella was at the agency during that time. And now he is supporting the current Trump administration and carrying out really a brutal mass detention and deportation campaign.

AMY GOODMAN : He was senior vice president at GEO Group, which runs Delaney Hall and many other immigrant jails, and now, starting today, is the head of ICE . If you could comment on the amount of money that GEO Group is getting? As Detention Watch has noted, earlier this year, GEO Group reported a company record of $254 million in profit last year, roughly a 700% increase from the year before.

SETAREH GHANDEHARI : Yeah, I’m going to say that again, to make sure your viewers heard: a 700% increase in profits. I mean, that’s really, really unheard of. And, you know, we heard throughout the election cycle how excited the private prison companies were about a potential Trump admin…