Deportation Inc.: Investigating the Business of Migrant Detention

A screening and conversation tracing the evolution of U.S. immigration enforcement into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

As border infrastructures are increasingly woven into the built environment at all scales across the United States, the League is organizing a series of programs and initiatives to explore design as a tool for understanding and organizing amid these changes.

Deportation Inc. is an ongoing investigative video series by SITU and Lawfare that examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power—where contracts, capital flows, and institutional incentives increasingly govern detention, deportation, and surveillance. While walls, checkpoints, and patrols remain the dominant visual shorthand, migrants are caught within increasingly complex and opaque systems of enforcement run and managed by private contractors tasked with everything from guaranteed bed quotas to speculative real estate strategies. Focusing on recent transformations in the immigration enforcement industry, this video series presents a high-yield, profit-generating business model that may be too big to fail.

The screening of Deportation Inc. will be followed by a conversation situating detention sites—from Newark to Guantánamo Bay—within longer histories of privatization, racialized incarceration, jurisdictional maneuvering, and municipal complicity. An audience Q&A will follow.

Learn more about the program and panelists here.

Banner image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Processing Facility, Tucson, Arizona, 2021. Image courtesy SITU Research

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