Cui Bono
It sure ain’t you and me.
In January, they sent 2,700 federal agents to Minnesota. They called it “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” They called our Somali neighbors “garbage.” They called it public safety.
Then they killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
I stood in below-zero cold with fifty thousand other Minnesotans to say that wasn’t okay. I visited the memorials. Flowers and candles on a Minneapolis sidewalk for Alex, the ICU nurse who cared for veterans and was shot ten times for holding up his phone. A growing pile of notes on Portland Avenue for Renée, the 37-year-old mother shot through her car window while parents were dropping kids off at the elementary school around the corner. I wrote about both of them in The Longest Month. I still think about them.
The official story is always public safety. Dangerous criminals pouring across the border, terrorizing communities, and only mass deportation can fix it.
There’s one problem: the data doesn’t support it.
So if the rationale falls apart, the oldest question in politics applies: cui bono? Who benefits? Because it sure isn’t the rest of us.
The Crime Claim Is a Lie
The National Institute of Justice, not exactly a left-wing advocacy group, funded a study using Texas Department of Public Safety records, one of the few states that actually tracks criminal arrests by immigration status. The findings: undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and at one-quarter the rate for property crimes.
That’s the opposite of what the administration claims.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank not known for being soft on crime, ran its own analysis of 2024 Census data and found illegal immigrants are about 44% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Legal immigrants are 75% less likely.
Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky went further back, building the first nationally representative dataset of incarceration rates for immigrants versus the U.S.-born covering 150 years. His conclusion: immigrants have never been incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans going back to 1880.
Meanwhile, the American Immigration Council compared crime data to demographic trends from 1980 to 2022. As the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled — from 6.2% to 13.9% — the total crime rate dropped 60.4%.
More immigrants. Less crime. For 40 years.
The administration knows this. Which means “public safety” is a sales pitch, not a policy rationale. So who’s actually buying?
Follow the Money: The Detention Industry
The most straightforward answer is private detention.
GEO Group and CoreCivic control roughly 90% of ICE detention beds. Their business model depends on bodies in cages. More bodies, more profit.
In the 2024 election cycle, the two companies, their PACs, subsidiaries, and executives donated a combined $2.8 million to Trump’s campaign and inaugural fund, according to FEC data compiled by the watchdog group CREW. Both companies doubled their inaugural committee contributions compared to 2017.
Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for GEO Group through Ballard Partners before taking office. Ten of the company’s thirteen lobbyists in 2024 were former government officials.
The investment paid off immediately. GEO Group reported a company-record $254 million in profit in 2025, roughly a 700% increase over 2024, driven by asset sales and new ICE contracts. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed in July 2025 allocated $45 billion for ICE detention expansion. GEO Group’s executive chairman called it “the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company’s history.”
CoreCivic’s then-CEO said it was “truly one of the most exciting periods” in his 32-year career.
I bet it was.
Pay-to-play is technically illegal for current federal contractors. Contributions to inaugural funds are not regulated. A gap you could fly a deportation plane through.
Follow the Fear: Labor Market Suppression
About 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented. In meatpacking, undocumented workers fill an estimated 30-50% of jobs. In construction, roughly a quarter. Home health aides, hospitality, landscaping — same pattern throughout.
These aren’t incidental numbers. They’re structural.
Meatpacking wages have dropped roughly 50% in real terms since 1975, while line speeds have more than doubled. The industry didn’t stumble into a cheap, compliant, non-organizing workforce. It recruited one. According to journalist Eric Schlosser, what the administration calls an “invasion” was a “corporate recruitment drive for poor, vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers.” Anthropologist Angela Stuesse documented how the practice accelerated in Southern poultry plants in the 1980s specifically because Black workers had begun to unionize.
Workers who fear deportation don’t report wage theft. They don’t demand safety equipment. They don’t organize. An AEI analysis found that fully removing unauthorized immigrants from California agriculture alone would raise farm wages by 42%, and cause many farms to go out of business. The profit margins depend on the wage suppression.
The crackdown doesn’t end that system. It tightens the screws on it. Terror is cheaper than reform.
The Bigger Game: Executive Power
This is the part that keeps me up at night.
The Alien Enemies Act has been invoked exactly three times in American history: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. Each time, there was an actual declared war against an actual foreign government.
Trump invoked it in March 2025 against members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, on the theory that their presence constitutes an “invasion.” No declared war. No foreign government involved. As the D.C. Circuit Court noted, the word “invasion” throughout the Constitution refers consistently to military action, not immigration.
What the Alien Enemies Act does, when invoked, is remove the usual requirement for evidence. Removal is not based on danger, a criminal record, or immigration status. The president decides who qualifies as an “alien enemy” and removes them. No trial. No hearing. Just a plane to El Salvador.
Think about that logic: if the president can unilaterally define the conditions under which the AEA applies, and then declare that those conditions exist, there is no meaningful check on that power at all. Immigration is the test case. Not because immigration is the goal, but because the population being targeted has the least political standing to fight back.
The administration has framed court orders blocking deportation flights as judicial interference with executive authority. When a federal judge ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident deported to El Salvador despite a court order protecting him, the administration refused. When the D.C. Circuit blocked AEA removals, the government went to the Supreme Court arguing the restraining order was “an intolerable judicial interference with the President’s power to protect national security.” Not that the court was wrong on the law. That the court had no right to rule at all.
That framing is the argument being built.
If they win it for immigrants, they’ll use it on the rest of us next. That’s not paranoia. That’s how precedent works.
None of that requires a conspiracy. It just requires asking the question. Cui bono? And then looking at where the money went.
I still think about Renée and Alex, and the 2,700 agents they sent to my state. The administration said it was about public safety. GEO Group’s shareholders would call it Q1 revenue. The meatpacking lobby would call the fear a feature, not a bug.
Renée and Alex would probably just say they were trying to live. Same as you and me.
Keep the list. thatsfuckedup.us