Wednesday, October 03, 2018

The Anti-Immigration Money Industry


Some companies are making a lot of money out of Donald Trump's repressive immigration policies. The amount of government money pouring into ICE contracts has almost doubled in the past year. Companies profiting from this expansion include some expected names in the prison and detention industry, such as the GeoGroup who have earned over $438 million from ICE contracts. However a number of house-hold names in other sectors of industry are also turning a profit from Trump's repressive immigration regime. These include Amazon, Dell and LinkedIn, who are all happy to make money from ICE contracts, whatever the cost to individual immigrants or their children.

Back in June Torn Apart / Separados Volume 1 began mapping the locations of ICE facilities across the United States. These are the facilities where more than 2,300 children separated from their parents and families are being held as part of Donald Trump's 'zero tolerance' immigration policy. In Torn Apart / Separados Volume 2 you can view an interactive map showing who is profiting from all the government money being poured into ICE.

The Torn Apart / Separados website includes a number of different visualizations of the ICE money trail. The 'Districts' visualization provides a map view of the total number of ICE dollars flowing into each congressional district. Hover over a district on the map and you can see how many ICE dollars have been spent in the district and who the district's largest recipient of ICE money has been.

The 'Gain' section of Torn Apart / Separados provides a 'scroll of shame'. Keep watching and this page slowly scrolls through the names of companies who are profiting by helping ICE and how much they are profiting by. This isn't the best way to view this data (although if you read the 'Textures' section there is an explanation as to why this approach was taken). If you want to view a database of all the companies profiting from ICE then you should instead browse through the open data repository for Torn Apart / Separados on GitHub.

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