By William Rice
The Trump administration’s brutal immigration policy has been a source of fear and misery for tens of thousands of migrant workers and their families. At the same time, corporations supporting Trump’s anti-immigrant operations are pulling in higher profits. And the CEOs of these companies are earning fat paychecks, made fatter by Trump tax policies.
A recent report from my organization, Americans for Tax Fairness, estimated that the CEOs of three government contractors assisting with the immigration crackdown could have saved a total of $88 million in taxes over seven years thanks to just one part of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law. Those potential savings will continue in the future because the law was recently extended by the current Trump administration and Republican Congress, a measure that also allocated $170 billion to militarized immigrant detention and deportation policies.
Almost all those potential tax savings would have gone to just one of the three top bosses, Alexander Karp, CEO of data-analysis firm Palantir. That’s because over the seven-years following enactment of the Trump tax law (2018-24), Karp was paid an unearthly $3.3 billion–80 to 100 times more than his CEO counterparts, Damon T. Hininger of private jailer CoreCivic and George C. Zoley of GeoCities, which runs detention centers and makes surveillance equipment. Of course, the potential savings enjoyed by the latter two are hardly negligible: $789,000 and $1.2 million, respectively.
Of the three companies, Palantir has the closest connections with the Trump administration. As our report explains: “Its co-founder and chairman of the board, billionaire Peter Thiel, is the political patron of Vice President JD Vance; and the administration’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, owns up to $250,000 of its stock.”
As of late September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had nearly 60,000 immigrants in custody and was behind a vigorous deportation program that’s on pace to throw 600,000 people out of the country by next January. Children and U.S. citizens have frequently been caught up in ICE’s violent dragnets. Despite the administration’s continuing claims that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, detainees with no criminal record recently outnumbered those with a record (often for minor offenses) rounded up by ICE.
Trump and his fellow Republicans have been adamant in describing their tax-and-spending law as a boon to to the middle and working classes. Yet, just as with their immigration claims, the reality is very different. Over 70 percent of the tax cuts will go to the highest-income 20 percent of households next year; over the next decade, the top 1 percent (including the three CEOs in our report) will rake in a trillion dollars in tax cuts. Meanwhile, whatever tax reduction is experienced by the middle class will be wiped out by higher costs from the service cuts in the law as well as by Trump’s chaotic tariff scheme.
The GOP immigration and tax initiatives share at least one important characteristic: both claim to be helping working people while actually hurting them. The ICE raids are rounding up thousands of hard-working immigrants, not dangerous criminals, and, in the process not actually aiding native-born workers. Communities are being disrupted, businesses are losing valuable employees and local economies are suffering from the attacks on their workforce.
Similarly, Republican tax policy – by giving the lion’s share of tax cuts to the already wealthy – further widens economic inequality, drives up public debt by trillions of dollars, and endangers the funding of services that help workers survive and thrive, from Social Security to healthcare to education to housing.
In the end, its people like the trio of immigration-crackdown contractors in our report who really benefit from the dual Republican policies of harassing immigrants and giving more tax cuts to the rich.
William Rice is a policy consultant with Americans for Tax Fairness, where he is senior writer and the director of reports.
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Previously Published on inequality.org with Creative Commons License
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