The Business of the Border: Digital Recruitment and the Corporate Capture of US Immigration Policy

Isabelle Powell | United States Fellow

Image sourced from Matthew Dillon via Flickr

When my great-grandparents arrived at Ellis Island from Ukraine and Sicily, they joined a trajectory of migration that has long defined the modern United States. That history of migration is often remembered as one of opportunity and democratic promise. Today, federal immigration policy has evolved into a profit-driven system increasingly shaped by moral panic, corporate interests and digital surveillance. Immigration enforcement has become a lucrative industry dependent on crisis and racialised rhetoric to sustain soaring profits. This is made possible by a vigorous digital recruitment campaign, responsible for scaling enforcement while shielding corporations and the state from accountability. To understand this, it is crucial to unpack how digital recruitment, corporate power, and a manufactured moral panic have forged a concerning new model of U.S. immigration policy, marked by impunity and escalating extremes.

Manufacturing Crisis

Despite empirical evidence consistently showing that undocumented immigrants do not commit crime at higher rates than natural-born citizens, conservative media and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) market a narrative of ‘existential threat’ in which America is described as being ‘invaded by illegal aliens’. The widespread use of the word ‘illegals’ substantially contributes to the perception of threat by the American public. One study even found that undocumented immigrants are in fact 33 per cent less likely to be incarcerated for violent crimes than US-born citizens. Nevertheless, crisis rhetoric creates a ‘moral panic’ that legitimises militarised enforcement. These strategies are having serious consequences, increasingly bringing federal agents into violent encounters with civilians, resulting in the fatal shootings of US citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti during immigration operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota in January 2026.

Corporate Capture

The constructed panic is being used to justify increasingly punitive immigration systems. At the centre of this is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In just one year, the number of people incarcerated in ICE’s immigration detention centres has increased by 75 per cent. To fund this massive expansion, ICE relies on a network of private corporations that have seized the opportunity for huge profit.

Within a DHS budget of approximately USD$170 billion, carceral immigration enforcement has become a lucrative enterprise. Behind ICE, federal contracts and detention quotas create a mutually reinforcing relationship between immigration enforcement and private capital. Private-equity-owned security giant Allied Universal, operating through its subsidiary G4S Secure Solutions, is the nation’s third-largest employer. The company provides much of the physical infrastructure that sustains US immigration detention, including transport vehicles, armed security guards and surveillance systems. CoreCivic and GEO Group have also received huge federal contracts for ICE detention with for-profit prisons. Crucially, they maintain strong lobbies in Washington, including funding think tanks to shape political narratives that reinforce their business models and commercial interests. Taking advantage of the amplified threat narrative, DHS plans to increase detention capacity from 50,000 to 107,000 beds across 125 facilities, creating a strong financial incentive to sustain large-scale detention regardless of actual migration and crime patterns.

This push for arrests has direct consequences for communities, even subjecting children and families to direct violations of the 1997 Flores v. Reno settlement, which legally restricts detaining children and making arrests in public places such as schools and places of worship. Overall, the convergence of corporate interests, moral panic, and political opportunism has created a booming detention economy.

Digitising Enforcement: Geofencing

To staff this expansion, ICE turns to aggressive recruitment campaigns that exploit current economic and job scarcity. The agency now offers new agents a USD$50,000 sign-on bonus as well as USD$60,000 in student loan repayment, successfully increasing the number of recruited agents by 12,000 in just one year (Pearson, 2026). Digitisation has been central to this expansion. ICE has allocated roughly USD$100 million over a one-year period to targeted recruitment strategies, including tactics such as “geofencing”. This technique creates a virtual perimeter around a physical area using GPS and cellular data to unknowingly track individuals and target tailored advertisements.

In this case, ICE markets jobs to people who enter physical spaces such as gun shows, NASCAR races and military bases. Digitisation further allows for targeted recruitment through ICE’s acquisition of private data to contact individuals who have attended UFC fights, searched for ‘guns’ online or listened to conservative radio. ICE labelled this drive as a “wartime recruitment strategy”, further demonstrating the ‘crisis’ propaganda at the centre of their activities. One ad reads “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” targeting young men and feigning relatability by co-opting the tone and language used in such spaces.

These campaign strategies demonstrate how technology is used as a mechanism for social control. By consciously targeting recruitment towards cohorts of young men associated with conservative culture, ICE seeks to deepen social divides between the American patriot and the immigrant ‘other’. Digital recruitment further entrenches the narrative of a crisis by inflating the necessity for aggressive action, justifying the use of extreme measures as a patriotic resolution.

Democracy Beyond Detention

Before the day my great-grandparents arrived at Ellis Island, and long after them, generations of migrants have journeyed to America, drawn by the enduring promise of safety and opportunity. Today, we stand at a pivotal crossroads: we can reclaim immigration policy in the spirit of democratic accountability and human dignity, or allow it to drift further toward detention, profit, and fear, shaping a darker and less prosperous future for us all.

Isabelle Powell is a graduate of the University of Sydney, where she earned a degree in Politics and International Relations. Her global perspective has been shaped by living, studying and working across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

She has worked in immigration centres in Sydney and Portland, USA, supporting refugees and survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence. Isabelle is the director of Stories of America, a documentary currently in post-production that draws on field research interviews across Oregon to explore migration, national identity and political polarisation in the United States.

In January, she will join the Office of Senator Bernie Sanders in Washington D.C., as a Press and Digital Communications Intern. With a particular interest in democracy and political economy, Isabelle looks forward to contributing thoughtful, globally informed analysis of American domestic and foreign policy during the Fellowship.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were used by this author for grammar checks and idea refinement, but all content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.