C (4:23)

You've done it.

A (4:24)

Hope it works on humans. Second positive story is coming out of Madison, Wisconsin, where we happen to have a secret documentary screening in just four days this Friday at the Orpheum Theater that I'm going to get to in a minute. But in case you're curious. Tickets are available at www.channel5.news. Anyways, in Madison this year, recent reports say their electric buses, their public electric buses, their EVs were emission free and reported zero mechanical problems throughout the entire entirety of this bone chilling winter. No gear breakdowns, no frickin problem with the space heaters, just smooth sailing without shooting diesel fumes into our precious ozone layer.

B (5:02)

Let's go.

A (5:02)

Madison, Wisconsin. I'll see you Friday. And here's a bit more about the tour. Don't skip it. Hey what's up guys?

C (5:08)

This is not an advertisement by the way, but did you hear that about

A (5:11)

a year ago we bought back our old show All Gas no brakes.

B (5:14)

Remember?

C (5:14)

From 2019 to 2020, my first show,

A (5:16)

we bought it back as well as the entire catalog of unreleased All Gas no Brakes episodes. If you're my friend and you come visit me in the RV, do not take a shit.

B (5:25)

Oh fuck, just course MS.13 is actually the biggest piece of shit I've ever met.

A (5:30)

And guess what? We are currently on tour right now going across the country screening OG and new All Gas no Brakes material and screening some never before seen Channel 5 documentaries that I think you'd like to see. So if you want to come to our C5 carnival, which is a hybrid all gas channel 5 screening with a talent show and a rap battle embedded inside of. You should definitely buy a ticket right now at www.channel5.news. It's called the C5 Carnival. We're going to so many different cities. If you Live in Madison, Wisconsin, St. Paul, Minnesota Salt Lake City, Utah Salt Lake City, Utah Again Chicago, Illinois Philadelphia, Penns, Tacoma, Washington Los Angeles, California San Francisco, California Portland, Oregon Austin, Texas Dallas, Texas Denver, Colorado Vancouver, BC Atlanta, Georgia El Paso, Texas Phoenix, Arizona San Diego, California Or Albuquerque, New Mexico. You too can see the return All Gas no Breaks episodes and the new Channel 5 secret documentary. And also maybe you can be in the talent show. Hope to catch you guys on tour again. Www.channel5news A night to remember. A night to never miss. A carnival of sorts, I'd say. Would you see you there? Also, just want to say real quick, this entire podcast is available in audio only format on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcast and many other platforms. Sir, if you're somebody who likes to listen to just words and shit, or if you're a truck driver who has to have Both hands at 10:2 with those eyes locked on the road, check out the audio feed. Just type in 5cast in all caps. You'll see a beautiful autumn field with a Five cast logo emblazoned on the front. That's us, baby. Check it out. All right, let's get into it.

C (7:20)

Thanks for sitting down with us. I really appreciate it.

B (7:22)

Nice to meet you. Of course. Yeah.

C (7:23)

For those who don't know, can you just tell the people what your name is and who you mostly work for?

B (7:26)

Yeah. My name is Doug McMillan. I'm a business reporter at the Washington Post. I've been doing investigations into the ways that businesses, corporations, industries cause harm to people over the years. And I've looked at everything from senior housing centers to the way American Red Cross trains lifeguards. They actually don't train lifeguards. They outsource that certification process. I've looked at ways the nuclear waste industry has a big problem on its hand with a bunch of nuclear waste sites around the country. So over the past year, I have been looking at this world of contractors to ICE and was surprised. As a business reporter, I was surprised to learn that, you know, ICE has kind of this whole industry of private companies that do everything from transporting, feeding, providing medical care to detaining and eventually flying out of the country immigrants who are in ICE's custody. So as a business reporter, my, you know, my alarms are popping off and saying, this is a business story and we should approach this and look at it right from the lens of, you know, who's making money. How do they potentially stand to gain even more under this administration as they ramp up the arrests of immigrant detainees? And what are the, you know, what are the ways in which this system is exposing people to harm? There's a long, kind of documented history of ice. Detention is a scary place to be for a lot of people. And whether, you know, whatever your views on, you know, whether people who are, you know, whose only crime is coming into this country illegally, whatever your views on whether those people should be arrested and put into detention centers? I think we can all agree that people should be treated humanely in these. In these buildings. And so there have been a lot of questions over the years, you know, long before President Trump came into office, about whether they're being treated humanely. What I found over the past few months is those questions have. Have been magnified. These facilities are now filling up with more and more people. In some cases, they're kind of overflowing with people. And this administration has ripped away some of the oversight measures that used to be in place to help make sure people were being treated humanely there.

C (9:38)

Yeah, it's really interesting because there's been so much reporting about what's happening on the ground like in Minneapolis, but less reporting on what actually happens behind the walls of these detention facilities, mainly because they don't allow reporters in. So your job is tracking down the experiences of people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated or detained in these facilities and getting that information to public. When you talk about some of these safeguards being stripped away and different quality of life issues behind the wall, what are some of the most poignant examples of human rights abuses inside ICE detention facilities?

B (10:08)

Yeah, one of the, I'll give you a specific facility, one of the kind of the pet projects of this administration. A completely brand new detention facility was built out of basically an empty patch of desert in the Texas desert on the border. It's near the Fort Bliss Army Base. They called this place Camp East Mont. It's in Texas, but they call it Camp East Montana. It's now the largest ICE detention center in the country. And basically it's not even buildings. They set up these soft sided structures that basically are big tents that hold. They currently hold around 4,000 detainees, but they're built to hold up to 5,000 detainees. And one of the things that my reporting showed was that when they were kind of racing to get this facility off the ground and build it really quickly and put detainees into it quickly, they sent ICE sent its own inspectors in to monitor the conditions there. So some of the things that the ICE inspectors came back with, they found that the food was inedible and many people were being forced to kind of either eat expired food, rotten food, or just go hungry. They found that many people were not even getting screened medically when they came in. It's really important if you're going to try to provide adequate medical care for people that, you know when they come into the, into the door, what their situation is physically, mentally, what their health situation is. Those screenings weren't happening. And they were also not giving people adequate means of communicating with the outside world. One of the federal standards for detention require you to either give detainees a tablet or phones or some way of communicating with lawyers, communicating with your family and just talking to the outside world. These people were getting tablets, but they are broken for weeks. So some of the just the basic essentials that federal standards dictate you're supposed to require give people in these facilities were not there. And so in that case, the inspectors came back and said that there were 60 violations of ISIS detention standards. We don't at this point, that was a few months ago. We don't know if they've resolved any or all those issues. But there are still significant concerns about this facility where there have been three deaths there just in the past few months.

C (12:17)

And what was the autopsy report as far as the cause of death?

B (12:20)

Death. So, yeah, so there were three deaths in December and January. One of those deaths was a man named Geraldo Lunas Campos is a 55 year old Cuban national, been detained there for a few months. And initially ICE puts out a press release. A few days after each person in his custody dies, they put out a press release, usually has a little bit of information about what happened to that person. In this case, they put out a press release saying, you know, he went to, he was sent to solitary confinement and a little while later they found him unresponsive. So really no information was given about, you know, why this person had died. That seemed suspicious to me. And I had a source telling me that actually this was a result of a use of force incident. So immediately started kind of working the phones, trying to get inside what happened here? I got in touch with the family of this man who had been in touch with the medical examiner who was examining his body. And the medical examiner told the family that they believed that it was a homicide and that this man looked like he had been essentially choked to death. I subsequently found witnesses, people who had also been detained and witnessed this event, who had witnessed guards choking the man to death. And they said his last words were, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. So pretty significant questions about, you know, what's going on in this facility. If a man who is detained there was choked to death by guards, you know, what is the, what is the reason that they were having to kind of detain him, restrain him? What is the reason that use of force ultimately led to him dying? And what is the protocol for if a situation is out of hand and you have guards there who are trying to get it back in order, how do you kind of apply use of force in a way that does not end up killing the guy? So we're still reporting that story and we're trying to figure out some of the answers to those questions.

C (14:05)

You've uncovered a number of incidents similar to that that have happened in ICE custody over the past year.

B (14:10)

Well, there's been a number of death so far. That's the only one that we know of, at least in recent history where a use of force incident behind the walls of the detention centers has led to a death. When you back up and look at the number of deaths in ICE detention, it's a really concerning picture, there were over 30 deaths in ICE detention in 2025. That's the highest number in at least two decades. And if you ask ICE about this, they will say that that increase is just a reflection of, well, there's more people there. So because there's more people, there's a bigger population, there's likely going to be more deaths. But we've done some initial kind of calculations and run the numbers and it looks like actually based on the number of total people that are booked in and the number of people who have died, it's still not the death rate. The rate at which people dying is still higher, much higher than historically is the norm. So it's pretty concerning. And you know, basically I'm trying to set out to answer the question, is ICE detention becoming more deadly than it has in the past? Because there's a higher number than in the past and also the past few weeks that number has been accelerating. Just in the first two weeks of 2026, there were at least six deaths in that span. So it's pretty concerning. We don't know why exactly that's happening. But I'm looking at things like the medical care, I'm looking at things like what kind of food and nutrition is provided to these people. And you know, what are they saying? What are these people telling us? What are the problems inside these places? Places?

C (15:36)

Yeah, I've covered like prison related stuff for, for quite some time as well. Not to the extent that you have, but there seems to be a connection. From what I've observed in the privatization of detention facilities and the amount of incidents like the one you described, it seems like when more facilities become private, there's greater exploitation, less oversight. Without federal jurisdiction or state jurisdiction, you have more weird things going down.

B (15:58)

There's definitely a profit motive. And so every time you have a profit motive, then you introduce this desire for how do we get higher margins out of this business and where is the company? And the two main companies that operate these places are called GeoGroup and CoreCivic. They are both publicly traded companies, so they are beholden to their public market investors in their stock. Every quarter they have to go before their shareholders and say, these are our results, this is what we're doing. And so how these companies, please, these investors is very much dependent on what their profit margins are and how they make those profit margins bigger. I mean, there's many different ways, but like the, the most basic ways, and we see this in many industries, is, you know, you, you strip out things like labor. Labor is One of the biggest costs, you strip out things like the quality of care. And in the past there has been a check on that where the government says, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna outsource these things to companies, but we're also going to provide oversight. And we're going to have these oversight bodies that come in, inspect the facilities. They're going to make sure that the humane conditions are being met, and they're going to basically ensure that these companies are fulfilling the terms of their contract, which is make sure that these are provided, these people are provided humane detention. Well, what the Trump administration over the past year has done is actually strip out some of the layers of oversight. They demolished two of the main groups. They were basically under dhs, but they were somewhat independent of dhs, and they could go in and actually respond to concerns that were being raised by detainees. So those groups no longer have that authority. They no longer have the power to go in there. And basically, I think there's a lot more trust is being placed on these companies to just kind of do right by the government and do right by the terms of their contract. Is that trust well placed? You know, I think we're kind of exploring that question right now. Yeah.

C (17:48)

So I think backing up a bit, just to give people who don't know what's going on some information. What is GEO Group and what is CoreCivic?

B (17:54)

These two companies, they've both been around for decades, and they've both basically operated private prisons for a long time. And this has been a controversial industry. It's been around for a long time, but it's based on the idea that the state and federal governments have struggled over the years to properly operate prisons. And over time, they've seen kind of an opportunity to outsource some of the prisons. And by prisons, I mean, I'm saying people who are criminally charged and convicted and sent to serve a sentence in prison. You know, these places are now operated by local and state and federal governments, but they're also operated by these private companies that have been criticized with stripping out some of the quality of care and quality of life inside these places. So this kind of backlash has led the GEO Group and core civics of the world to start focusing more and more on ICE detention contracts. So they have seen a decline in their, their former business, their core business of prisons. And so they're trying to replace that by going into ICE detention. And they've been very successful in that. So over the past 10 years or so, ice has become the biggest source of revenue for Geo Group and Core Civic. So it's become a very kind of symbiotic relationship. And it's also kind of this relationship has been very, very profitable for these companies. And under this Trump administration, and we're now seeing these companies really kind of like, take advantage of their position when the government is saying, we need to deport millions of people. Well, these companies are now going and saying, we can reopen all these former prisons that were closed under Obama and Biden, and we can fill those people with immigrant. Those prisons with immigrant detainees. So they're seeing kind of a huge expansion opportunity under this administration. And, you know, for the most part, their businesses have prospered because of that.

C (19:46)

What percentage of detention facilities that are set up for immigrants are currently operated by either Geo Group or Corecivic?

B (19:52)

The vast majority. Majority of immigrant detainees are inside of facilities run by private companies. Now, just the sheer number of ICE detention facilities is very big because many of them are small, and many of them are. Include small county jails that hold prisoners, but they also hold ICE detainees. So there are dozens and dozens of those. These private detention contractors operate much larger detention facilities that typically hold between between 500 to 2,500 detainees. And so they're more kind of concentrated in these private detention centers.

C (20:25)

But let's say, like, who owns Ote Mesa?

B (20:28)

I think that's Corecivic, but I'll have to check on that one. I think that's Corecivic.

C (20:31)

Yeah, I think that it is, because I'm one of the few people not to make this about myself, but I'm one of the few American non immigrants to be detained in ICE detention.

B (20:39)

Oh, wow.

C (20:40)

Yeah. Tell me about that. I crossed the border with some coyotes in the Mexican state of Coahuila, up over the river. So I walked the river to Eagle Pass. I thought that I could do it. Turns out you can't. Even if you're an American citizen, you can't hop your own border.

B (20:52)

Wow.

C (20:53)

So I got held in an ICE detention facility for three days, and it was terrifying. It was like 40 people in a room. One bathroom, one jug of Gatorade in the center of the room. Everybody gets space, blankets. 62 degrees in there. It's like a refrigerator. They played Marley and Me over and over again for days. I don't know if it's a torture method or if they just don't have any other DVDs there. And so everybody. But then I was there for days. But most people stay. The immigrants that were in my pod it would be one day, then they'd be transferred to Otay Mesa, which is a private facility.

B (21:21)

Yeah.

C (21:21)

So I'm glad you answered the question that way, because there are these small processing centers that are owned by counties and states. Mine was owned by the actual, actual DHS or cbp.

B (21:29)

Yeah.

C (21:30)

South Texas Processing Center.

B (21:31)

Did you not tell them you're an American citizen?

C (21:33)

They don't give a fuck.

B (21:34)

Really?

C (21:34)

They were so mad at me. They were just angry and, like, I think I presented a real, like, moral conundrum for some of these ICE guys.

B (21:41)

Yeah.

C (21:41)

Because they were like. Or the CBP guys.

B (21:43)

Yeah.

C (21:43)

Because they had been used to treating people like kind of like slabs of meat. Meet, like detainees, like, ah, where are you from? You're from Guatemala. All right, get in there. You're going to be home soon. For me, they, like, didn't know whether to treat me like a detainee or a person.

B (21:53)

Yeah.

C (21:54)

But I got no phone calls, nothing like that. Nobody knew where I was.

B (21:56)

Huh. Wow. That's quite an experience.

C (21:58)

Yeah. But the point is, everybody was going from there to Ote Mesa. I was wondering, you know, and then I looked it up, and it is owned by CoreCivic.

B (22:04)

Yeah.

C (22:05)

So you have these private companies owning a lot of these private prisons or private detention facilities, but you've also done some reporting that shows inroads between Geo Group and the Trump administration itself.

B (22:15)

Yeah.

C (22:15)

And this is interesting because so much of Trump's recent focus has been on acquiring different things, like, for example, oil from Venezuela or rare earth elements from Greenland. And you see that there's many people in both of those natural resource lobbies that have funded his campaign and are currently embedded in some way in his administration.

B (22:32)

Yeah.

C (22:33)

Where are the inroads between Geo Group and the Trump admin?

B (22:36)

Well, you know, I see this a lot, and I think it. And I've explored it, but there's this question of, you know, is the Trump administration detaining so many people for so long? Are they putting these people in these places to generate money for this industry? I don't. I haven't seen any smoking gun of that so far. But there are some pretty interesting connections that one would explore if you were exploring that question. Geo Group has a long history, in particular, Geo Group has a long history of hiring people who used to work at ice. So there are now a number of current executives, people who are leading GeoGroup who, you know, used to. Used to help run ice. So that's one connection with this administration. Specifically one former GeoGroup executive, his name is David Ventura is now one of the, kind of the leading behind the scenes players at ice. And he's actually, my source is telling me he's helping to kind of oversee the big kind of detention push and how we're going to expand. Detention is actually being run by a guy who used to work in one of the biggest detention contractors just like two years ago. And there are a lot, there are ethics rules against that. And David Venturaella actually got a waiver from those ethics rules that we're still trying to get a hold of the text of that waiver because we don't know on what grounds the government declared that that was okay. Another person with ties to GeoGroup is Tom Homan, who is Trump's border czar. He's kind of been the big cheerleader of the immigration crackdown. If you see his statements. He's been out kind of endorsing and pushing for an expansion of detention and supporting the expansion in places like the new facility in the Evergreen, the Alligator, Alcatraz. He was the guy out there defending how people were being treated there. So he's been a champion of that. And at the same time, he was a paid consultant for Geo Group just a couple years ago. So there is this connection of, you know, are they, are the people in this administration really helping their buddies or are they somehow profiting directly themselves? Again, haven't seen any smoking gun of that, but I think it is, it is something that's worth exploring because as you mentioned, you know, people in this administration do not seem to have any qualms about that at all. And there have been many examples of people in this administration enriching themselves from the policies that are rolling out of the White House right now.

C (24:42)

And can you think of any other examples of people being personally enriched by kickbacks like that?

B (24:47)

Not off the top of my head. Those are the ones that come to mind right now. You mean between the private prisons specifically?

C (24:52)

Just in general, like as far as tracing that, like, pattern of behavior to other sectors in the Trump admin.

B (24:57)

Oh, I probably shouldn't go there today. Okay. I just, I wouldn't want to overspeak and I haven't done personal reporting on that.

C (25:05)

Well, for example, like the oil and gas lobby were instrumental. They spent almost, I think it was like multi billion dollars pumping money into Trump's campaign. And then the same guy who oversaw those contributions through a super PAC is now one of his energy secretaries who set up the meeting in the White House with like Chevron and Halliburton after the Maduro kidnapping and oil seizure. So just for anybody watching this, it all seems pretty illegal. I'm curious if the private prison lobby, GEO grouping Corecivic had any campaign contributions in 2024.

B (25:34)

Yeah, they were both very big donors to not only the campaign, but I believe that both of them also donated to the inauguration fund and they might have also donated to subsequent. There's a lot of opportunities now in D.C. for companies that want to get in with the administration to donate to various things, and I think they have been. GEO Group and corecibic have consistently been one of the top contributors to them. You know, they're not alone. There's many companies that are donating across the political spectrum and, you know, across many different industries. So it's hard to look at one donation and say, you know, this led to that. But it's definitely, you know, I think something, it's something worth noting. One other person that comes to mind is Pam Bondi, the Attorney General. She used to also be a lobbyist for GEO Group. So she, and she knows that. Yeah, she, she, she knows that company well. And you know, she, as, as the Attorney General, she oversees the Bureau of Prisons, which is phasing out their work with GEO Group right now. So she has some kind of, you know, a little bit of potential conflict there. But the Attorney General doesn't directly oversee ice and, and the things that they

C (26:31)

do, I'm trying to understand because I'm not like a stock market genius when it comes to publicly traded companies, but what is the process for generating revenue like after people are detained? Like, how does GEO Group profit from people being detained at these facilities?

B (26:44)

It's all done through these contracts. And the contracts are negotiated between. ICE has a contracting office and they deal with the companies directly. And they say, you know, basically we're going to, we're going to set up up a detention operation here. And these are all the, the things that we're going to agree to doing. It's going to house people humanely. It's going to offer them, you know, beds and clothes and, and nutritious food and recreation. It's going to, it's going to lay out the terms of the contract. But a big part of that contract is going to be something called the bed rate. And so the bed rate is basically the amount of money that the government is paying per detainee. They can be structured in different ways, but generally in many detention centers, they are incentivized to be detaining more people. So that's why when you, when you Listen to, you can actually hear, you can listen to the earnings calls that these companies do with their investors every quarter. And they'll talk about things like the bed rates and the, you'll, you'll hear there's a lot of focus on how many detainees are in ISIS system. Now. We started this Trump administration, we started with around 35 to 40,000 detainees on average per day. We're now up around above 70,000 per day. So. And not all of them, but many, most of those people are being housed in some way by one of these private companies. So generally that has increased revenue. The two main companies we're talking about are seeing record revenues right now. There's some concern about. Investors are actually starting to be a little bit concerned about whether that's going to continue. The pace of the increase in detainees has actually slowed down a little bit when we've gone from like 60,000 to 70,000. Starting to slow down a little bit, maybe because the administration is not able to arrest as many people as it thought it could per day, or maybe they're running out of people that they can arrest also.

C (28:28)

There's more fear at the border now.

B (28:29)

Yeah. So generally the, the vibe with these companies at the beginning of this administration was this is going to be the greatest thing that's ever happened to, you know, shareholders in this company. Now the vibe is a little bit more muted. There's a little bit more concern about, you know, is this really going to be transformative event for these companies? But they're, you know, they're doing fine. They're doing really well right now. Yeah.

C (28:50)

Do you see a world in which maybe like, Trump opens the borders back up to get more money for the group troops? I mean, they did it during the election, prior to the election.

B (28:59)

I think he would have a hard time explaining that to his base.

C (29:03)

Well, but you gotta think about it. I mean, Governor Abbott of Texas, you know, he refused to sign off on the bipartisan legislation that would have limited asylum seekers from hopping the border and claiming asylum here.

B (29:12)

Right.

C (29:12)

Because they knew that they needed to rely on the immigration issue to fear monger and generate, you know, votes for the upcoming election.

B (29:18)

Right.

C (29:19)

You don't think that maybe there'd be a call with GEO Group and Homan and Trump that are like, yo, let's open the border back up. We need that bed rate cracking this year.

B (29:26)

It's an interest point because it speaks to the question of who is in these facilities now. So in the past, these facilities tend to be mostly border crossers and tend to be people who are arrested by CBP along the border and taking these facilities. That's also why you tend to see these facilities distributed along the south and the Southwest, places like Florida, all the way to Texas and New Mexico, California, a growing portion, I don't know if it's a majority, but a growing portion of the people inside these places. Cases were arrested in what's called, what they call the interior, which is basically all the non border states. This is an increasingly diverse population of people because they are, you know, going to people's homes, they're going to schools, they're going to churches, they're going to courtrooms and they're arresting people who, you know, have sometimes lived, you know, decades in the U.S. you know, working jobs, paying taxes, contributing to their communities. And they're taking these people and putting them into detention centers. Sometimes these people are parents, grandparents in detention center. So they, the kind of, the makeup of who is in these facilities is changing a lot and is no longer just kind of the border crossers. So that's also kind of changing the business for these people. A lot of these people are probably more likely to have health problems because I think on average they're arresting and detaining older people. And so that has become a challenge for some of these companies. How do we provide health care? They're not suddenly going to start spending more money on healthcare. So how do we actually adequately provide for these people who have healthcare? One of the best examples is this man who's detained in Georg detention facility in Georgia. He was brought to this, to this country when he was, I think two years old, when he was a very small child. And he has no legs, he has double prosthetics. And he typically somebody like that would just have gotten a waiver and been released. They would have made some accommodation when they were arrested, not detained. This man has been held for months and months. I think probably over 10 months, maybe almost a year this man has been held there even though there's, you know, a coalition of activists who are all kind of urging his release. He explained to me in a phone call last year that he needs to plug his prosthetics into a wall in order to charge him every night. And they're not giving, he tells me that ice is not giving him enough time to charge them. So a lot of times they just don't work. And when his prosthetics don't work, he can't move. So he can't even walk down to the end of the hallway to get food. For himself. He has to ask somebody to get food. So this is the kind of like, it's a. It's a. It's a good example of how these types of people who, in a normal year wouldn't have been detained and these companies that detain people wouldn't have had to think about how to accommodate someone like that. They're having to, like, deal with that and figure that out on a. On a bigger level. It's not just this guy. It's many people who are dealing with situations like. Like this.

C (32:04)

And you think it's maybe fair to speculate that, like, meeting this detention quota at these private facilities could be related to the sheer amount of people that are being pulled from the interior and held indefinite.

B (32:16)

It's hard to prove what people's motives are, but if you listen to the administration, they're trying to meet Trump's expectation of millions of people being deported. Right now, we're nowhere near that. We were Even close to 1 million people being deported in this term. I'm not even sure that they had the highest number of deportations in a single year of any president yet. I think that, you know, there has been pressure from what Trump is saying in the White House on down to what Stephen Miller says, to what Tom Homan says in press briefings. I think one point, they said they were targeting 3,000 arrests a day. I don't know if they've met that or come close to that. But, yeah, the administration has been staking their political livelihood and their political message around. We want to deport millions of illegal immigrants. You know, before you worry about the private companies, I think you should hold them to that. Like, are they actually accomplishing that?

C (33:00)

You mentioned the bed rate. Could you give a specific number of how much is generated, like, per head at one of these places?

B (33:05)

DHS usually publishes a bed rate for the whole system, not for individual places. And I think in the past, it's been around $150 per person, per head day. You know, when you're taking people out of their communities and out of their. Sometimes their jobs, and you're taking away their ability to pay taxes and kind of contribute to our society, no longer are these people contributing to society. They're actually now a. A major cost. I think that's an interesting kind of comparison. When you start to see, like, you know, industries of communities that used to really rely on immigrant labor and immigrant taxpayers.

C (33:41)

Yeah, but I guess the initial question was, like, how do these companies make money? The better rate costs the company or the Taxpayer that money, right?

B (33:47)

Yeah.

C (33:47)

How do these individual companies profit from detention?

B (33:50)

So they have a margin, just like a hotel, just like any business. So they have a bed rate they agree on with the government and the government pays them, let's say $150 a day per person. They now take that $150. They say, okay, $10 of that is going to go to pay for our phone bills for this facility. $5 of that is going to go to pay for the, the food that we have distributed. So, like, when you take that $150, it gets sliced up into all the different costs that go into running this facility. Many subcontractors, many other companies are coming in to fulfill different services. And at the end of the day, you have some portion of that is the profit that these places make. The biggest slice of that, of that pie is almost always labor. I don't know the exact number, but it's a significant portion of that pie. Where again, you start to see some kind of messing around with this model. When the detention companies say, well, do we really need to have eight guards in this hallway? What if we can make do with four guards in this hallway? We really need to have a medical team, team of two doctors and six nurses. Can we really make do with one doctor and three nurses? There are some regulations. Typically the contracts will say you have to staff these with a certain number of people. But there's also been a long history of the companies kind of failing to meet those staffing goals.

C (34:53)

Would you say that on average, the conditions of a privately owned detention facility are worse than that of one that is managed by a county, state, or federal governing body?

B (35:01)

It's hard to say. I think there have been some studies that show that, but I don't know if there's anything conclusive. How do you rank human misery? How do you rank suffering, and how do you rank conditions? I don't know anything definitive about that.

C (35:13)

So a lot of young people our age see stuff happening, like mass detention, just basically everything going on. Every distraction deployed by the Trump administration. The Greenland acquisition as a distraction from the biggest story of the day, which is the Jeffrey Epstein file release. In your experience reporting, do you give any credence to that theory? They shut down the government to avoid the release of the Epstein files. And right when the second batch was about to come out, all of a sudden the operation begins in Minnesota. Somali Franklin fraud. Everything is. The extreme fear mongering begins.

B (35:42)

Well, I mean, just going back to immigration, I think, I don't know what this president thinks in his own head about immigration. But I do know there's a very strong sentiment held by a large portion of this country, you know, if not majority, then close to a majority of this country who strongly feel like illegal immigrants need to be locked up and sent away from this country country. And this is a big reason, if not the main reason that this president got reelected was running on that. So I don't think it's necessarily a distraction. I think that this issue is his core issue.

C (36:20)

When this whole conversation started, you mentioned even outside of Core Civic and Geo Group that you do a lot of reporting to encourage corporate accountability and talk about the ways that big business has hurt the everyman and hurt people in the country. Who are the top five most evil corporate corporations?

B (36:34)

I'm not going to go there.

C (36:35)

Okay, not evil. Who are the top five most harm causing corporations according to what you've reported?

B (36:41)

There's a lot of ways to measure that, right? How are you going to look at harm? Do you measure harm by the amount of greenhouse gases that a company emits?

C (36:48)

So let's say Blackstone and their control over real estate, that kind of stuff?

B (36:51)

Well, so there are different ways. Harm could be harming consumers by charging them exorbitant rates for things they vitally need. That category would be, look at the monopolies that exist in the country like telecom. I don't really have any choice in my house which cable and Internet provider I can get. I'm at the mercy of this company that I pay exorbitant amount of money so I can have Internet at my house. Those kinds of companies are not very popular and I think that you could argue that's one kind of harm. Another kind of harm is employees employer harm. Who are the companies that employ a lot of people who are unhappy, who feel like they're not given a fair shot at raising the family and benefits and getting fair wages. You know, there's been a number of questions about Amazon over the years. Is Amazon their employer to people who, you know, work in these warehouses and work their butts off to kind of make this logistics system work, is that, you know, a good living for them? So employer harm is another kind. There's environmental harm. The oil and gas, the fossil fuel companies will be the top of the list of, you know, environmental harm companies. As a corporate accountability reporter, I think about this a lot. How do you look for the companies that are causing the most harm? How do you slice which companies are doing the most damage to the world? There's different ways to Measure that one way is just are companies killing people? I did some reporting on, as a Californian, you'll know PG&E, which has actually been convinced, convicted of killing people based on negligence, that they cause explosions and fires in that state. You know, another one is Boeing has been under the gun in the past few years about safety lapses and a whole culture of prizing kind of Wall street earnings and financial results over actual safety and kind of focusing on engineering the most safe plane we can. And that really came back to bite them in a big way when those two 737 Max crashes happen. You know, our company's killing people. Another layer that we're now starting to think about is tech and AI. And so, you know, what is the amount of good that These companies, Google, OpenAI and Amazon, Microsoft, the companies that are telling us this is really something great. It's going to cure cancer, it's going to change the world, it's going to change how you do work, going to change how you live. Well, how do we measure that against the real harms that the technology is now kind of imposing on society? It's smartphones and apps are demanding our attention. They're kind of hooking us into kind of always focusing on the software at the risk of living our lives. They're demanding our attention, they are demanding our data. And these AI tools, there's a lot of concern now about how they're potentially manipulating our emotions or manipulating our psyche and potentially putting vulnerable people and children at risk of harm to themselves. So I think that's another kind of harm that we're starting to see with technology companies.

C (39:11)

And when you talk about AI putting young people in harm's way, are you talking about like encouraging self harm through chatgpt? Flukes in the software that don't detect, I guess, red flags?

B (39:20)

Yeah, there's a number of lawsuits that are going on right now about parents whose children committed suicide. And they think that machatbot played a role in kind of encouraging that kind of thinking.

C (39:28)

It's hard because my first impulse is it's the death of creativity. It's going to make it easy to replicate and duplicate the authentic style of others. This is the end. This is the ultimate brain rot final boss. Our youth are cooked. We're never going to have original thoughts again. Every single person is now a commodified property of the algorithm. There's no privacy anymore. The only option is living in a trailer park in the desert alone.

B (39:48)

But then, well, you already do that, so you're good then I think about

C (39:51)

it and I'm like, are we just the people that used to ride horses and got pissed when the Model T came around, or are we just the

B (39:57)

people who used to read and then

C (39:58)

the Kindles came around?

B (39:59)

We just need to adapt.

C (39:59)

Is this just another technological advancement that great artists will learn to use to their advantage?

B (40:04)

One of the stories is making the round in my way World. Is that a newspaper in Cleveland? I forget exactly which one. They made this public statement saying they weren't going to hire some writer who wanted to write because they said that. Now the job of journalists at this newspaper is to just go out and report, get information, and then feed it to basically an AI editor who's going to write the story. It's a very interesting idea. I personally think that we're not ready for that. I'm biased. I like to write stories. And I personally think that writing is thinking. The way that I write my stories is informed by what I gathered when I'm reporting. And when I'm out reporting, I'm also like looking for, for things that are going to go in the story. So I find those two things connected. And I also think that readers don't want to read AI slop. If you don't take the time to write it, why should anybody take the time to read it?

C (40:47)

And I hope that you're right and I hope that real authenticity is able to cut through the AI slope. Yeah, you know, I think that it will. But at the same time, I catch myself sometimes, like, not realizing something's AI. That's because I'm scrolling. And I really feel like there's a war for our minds. Yeah, I feel like there's a nefarious force that is trying to make us as stupid as possible. Then I realized, no, there's no boogeyman. It's just a capital incentive structure of the platforms. Engagement is dollars. These or for profit companies or private companies. You can best get engagement from a user of, let's say Instagram or TikTok by addicting them to it through short form.

B (41:17)

I mean, look, the mental health problem, again, like, One thing that ChatGPT could do when somebody starts expressing suicidal ideation is they could just stop. Yeah, they could say, you're not going any further than that. Tim Altman, I think is opening eyes, talked a little bit about. We're going to implement safeguards like that, continuing to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress and connect people with care. But as far as I know, the chatbot Keeps talking to you, even if you kind of go down these kind of dark directions. So why are they doing that? Why? You know, I think that there might be a hubris right now. Some of these Silicon Valley companies, well, they can be your therapist. They can actually help you through these problems. You know, we've seen where hubris has led corporations in Silicon Valley in the past, and it's not good. You know, these kinds of things should be really approached with a lot of caution and a lot of concern for, you know, I don't want my therapist to be a software engineer in Menlo Park.

C (42:06)

Yeah, of course. Or I don't want my therapist to necessarily give me the standard GPT therapy because I've noticed. Different topic. A lot of modern therapy tries to teach you to be selfish. You ever see a therapist before? I know, HIPAA violation, but you see a therapist, sometimes, you tell them your problems. You have people to provide for. You have a family. And they tell you, you know what? Like, put yourself first. Self care is number one. And you're like, no, it isn't. It's not number one. It's not number one at all. It's like number 10. I do feel like some of the modern therapy is coded in that way that helps people get around their responsibilities maybe.

B (42:35)

Yeah.

C (42:35)

And so I think that's why the divorce rate is so high.

B (42:38)

I'm just kidding.

C (42:39)

Only kidding. We need more traditional human beings in the flesh to maybe get a good read on us. Like, no human being can just be fed advice through a computer.

B (42:47)

Definitely. Teletherapy is good and it opens access to people. But having a human being and a human brain thinking about your problems and what are potential solutions and how to address the problems in your life, that's something uniquely a human can do, at least right now.

C (42:59)

It's also all very scary for our position as journalists. The newspaper industry and the digital media industry has already been decimated by the dwindling attention span of online users to where now every platform, even the big, big dogs like Washington Post, New York Times, is having to adapt to short form just to reach anybody below 25.

B (43:15)

Yeah.

C (43:16)

So this, I hope, is not the nail in the coffin for legit information.

B (43:18)

Well, look at my news organization just laid off 350 people just in the last couple weeks. It's a lot of my friends, and honestly, some of the best journalists in the whole world just woke up one morning to find out they lost their job. And that is obviously not just a reflection of what we're talking about. And the Decimation of the business model that had to do with it. It also had to do with management decisions at the company that I work for. It is a reality that this thing that we do is changing. We need to learn how to adapt.

C (43:43)

And specifically, one of the benefits, like for you, is that you working for a big organization gives you legal safeguards. You can write an article about a corporation that would have the power to sue an individual into poverty, and you have that shield of the Washington Post to at least have your back. They've got retainers for when I'm sure you've got.

B (43:57)

The flip side of that is you have to convince the lawyers that it's okay to do that.

C (44:00)

Yeah, exactly. But once that article gets published, you know, for me, if I put something out there and somebody doesn't like what I wrote, I'm being sued right now for violation of the Federal Wiretap act by a guy that I've never even filmed, met, and certainly never wiretapped. I interviewed somebody who spoke negatively about him, and he's trying to sue me as a way to punish me for platforming his adversary. That could never happen with the Washington Post. Another fear that I have is in the Post, AI journalism, barren industry. If there is only, you know, four journalists at every news outlet who are just have like a bunch of robots around writing up their daily briefings, then all these other journalists who are going to have to do freelance work are now going to be easier to be targeted by the corporate.

B (44:36)

Well, then a law firm can open up a journalism process practice and they can serve all the journalists. Yeah, they love us.

C (44:42)

Law firms are dying to take us on contingency. Have you ever had a real threat from a big corporation where you're like, oh my God, I got to slow my role here?

B (44:49)

I've written about companies where I had to go through a lot of hoops to get our internal lawyers on board with hitting the publish button. The go to move is to hire. There's a handful of defamation lawyers, you know, all their names, and they're always the first call. These companies hire, they can create problems for getting the story published. But we believe strongly in our reporting. And if I have facts, you're free to publish facts. And so that's what we do.

C (45:13)

But I guess the fear is that, you know, that you take testimony from somebody, if that testimony is thought to be false, you can be sued for not doing your due diligence. Like with the Boeing whistleblower case.

B (45:22)

Yeah.

C (45:22)

Would Boeing be able to sue the Washington Post? For being like, this guy's full of shit. You should have known that.

B (45:26)

I don't know enough about that. Once a comment on it. If you're reporting on allegations somebody made, you at a minimum, need to take great care and diligence with trying to confirm the accuracy and trying to understand the basis for those claims and also giving a very fair chance for the from the other person to comment.

C (45:43)

And that's the main reason, I'm afraid, for the future of journalism in a post AI world. You know what an anti slap statute is, right? When you're being sued for defamation by a billionaire who's trying to bully you. Used to be able to file an anti slap motion which basically said, hey, this lawsuit needs to be thrown out. This is not right. Sometimes the judge wouldn't understand, so she would deny it. Used to be able to appeal, right now they just reversed the anti slap appeal process, meaning you have to move to deposition and summary judgment. It's crazy. Like the safeguards to protect journalists, especially independently, are getting really, really small.

B (46:11)

Real journalism, I think, still matters. I don't think that AI will do our jobs. Ultimately, certain aspects of our lives can be automated, but the idea of gathering new information, gathering facts that are hard to find, getting sources to tell us things that maybe they're not supposed to tell us, and revealing information about the world and how it works, how government works, how big corporations work from the inside, this is stuff that a chatbot can't do, as far as I know. So I believe that that's going to continue to exist.

C (46:40)

That video that came out recently, there was a drone shot of people inside of a detention facility in the outdoor area, wearing blue and red ponchos, talking to the camera. Do you know what facility that was taken at?

B (46:50)

I don't vaguely rings a bell, but I don't know exactly which one that is.

C (46:54)

Is there anything that American people and American voters can do to stop what's going on with the expansion of these detention facilities?

B (47:02)

One of the few groups of people who are actually allowed into detention centers are members of Congress. And so members of Congress do have an oversight role by law, that they're allowed to go, given a certain amount of notice, show up the facility, tour the facility, talk to people who are inside. To some extent, they're a little bit limited in what they can do with that information. So, you know, one of the things people can do is vote. They can. Or they can talk to their. They can talk to their representative in Congress, push for more transparency, push for more policies around this. And they can vote in the midterms about, you know, what they. What they see in these detention centers that they don't. They do or they don't like going back to these warehouses that they're building. These are buildings that are not going to adhere to any local zoning law, because the federal government's position is that when they buy these places, it's federal property and it's no longer kind of beholden to local laws, whether that's zoning or whether that's any kind of permitting processing, which is kind of strikes a lot of locals as insane because these are buildings that were not built to house humans. But ultimately, end of the day, there's something in the Constitution called the Supremacy Clause. It says when the federal government have a policy and a priority that will take precedence over local jurisdiction. So ultimately, at the end of the day, it does look like the federal government will be able to buy and operate these warehouses. They're probably going to bring in some of the outside companies we're talking about to run the detention centers, renovate them and run them. Even though these communities are going to have to kind of live with the impacts on their infrastructure, they're not going to really have any meaningful engagement with these buildings. Which I think is exactly what you're talking about is like, I don't like this is happening, but I don't feel like there's anything I can do about it.

C (48:29)

Where is the first ICE warehouse getting built?

B (48:31)

We think that the first one is going to open in the next few months, maybe as soon as April in Maryland. It's right. That's right outside of Hagerstown. It's about 90 minutes west of here.

C (48:39)

So, yeah, I want to cover the story. I was just trying to figure out the right place to begin the journey.

B (48:43)

Well, this is a problem with my reporting is how do. How do I take my readers inside these facilities when I can't go inside?

C (48:48)

You could do what I did. If you right now cross the Rio Grande, you will be arrested and taken to a nice facility for three days. I was under Biden. I did it under the Biden administration. But I'm sure that Trump would probably make an example out of you.

B (49:00)

So how do we report on what's going on inside if we can't get in? So that's a challenge right now. I'm trying to figure out. So one way is audio, video. These places have surveillance cameras. Those should be public records. Can we somehow get our hands on the surveillance cameras? There's 911 calls made from these facilities. Those are records of real harms and things that are happening inside the facilities. This is kind of what I'm working on is like, how do we get documentary proof of what's happening inside these places? Because I can't go inside. But I need to take my readers and show them, kind of bridge the empathy gap. Because when you can't go inside, you don't have any empathy for it. You don't know what it's like inside there. You don't know what was it like? Tell me, was it like a prison? Like, what did it feel like?

C (49:36)

So I've been to jail for graffiti. County jail in South Dakota. It's not where I'm from. I was on a road trip. County jail is a lot better than ICE detention. The difference is that in county jail, you get all of the regular privileges of being an American citizen. In jail, they ask you if you want to go to the library. You get some Stephen King books. You go, you sleep the entire time. There's eight dudes. Everyone's got a bed. There's lights out, there's chow time. In ICE detention facilities, there's no commissary, there's no phone calls. The lights never turn off. There's a constant, really. The one that I was in never turns off. And they would call it the Ailera, which is the ice box. And you talk about deterrent methods like Alligator Alcatraz. They keep the pods that house the detainees as cold as possible with the hopes that they'll return to their home country and be like, yo, it's freezing in there. It was horrible.

B (50:19)

Did you get a blanket or anything?

C (50:20)

They give you a single space blanket, which is that 25 cent reflective thing, the silver one. They give you no pillows, so everyone sleeps on their own shoes. Many of the shoes are covered in like gross water from the Rio Grande. They give you like one or two meals a day. It's disgusting. Shared bathroom for 40 people. One toilet. It's in the corner. Everyone has to watch you take a shit. People are holding for days, so you

B (50:43)

gotta do what you gotta do.

C (50:44)

You think that that's with one cellmate, 40 other dudes. But there is strange loopholes. For example, you can request snacks all the time. I don't know why that exists, but you can request specifically a Capri sun juice box. There's a button where you can say you need it. So these really strange things where you're like, are you guys trying to meet some requirement legally?

B (51:04)

Interesting. Well, there are so a lot of These places you have commissaries and there's a, there's a theory that like they make the, the food that you get for free really bad and they jack up the prices of the stuff in the commissary. People have actually compared the prices of like a tube of toothpaste in the commissary versus one you can just buy at a local drugst store in the same area. And it's like $13 for the same 200 toothpaste you get for $2 somewhere else.

C (51:25)

Yeah, yeah.

B (51:25)

That's, you know, potentially part of the business model. There's always ways of trying to make money pretty universally I've heard that the food in these places that they give you like cold burritos and stuff, this almost inedible.

C (51:34)

I was in South Texas Processing center in Eagle Pass, Texas. Most people from there were going to Ote Mesa or a facility in San Antonio. Those places probably have tablets, commissary, et cetera. But I was in the very first stage of processing. Yeah, some people had been there for a really long time. There's a judge, they had a 24 hour Zoom judge still. Like you can't have an appointment for like four days. But as far as your news gathering practices, the big challenge of documenting it is getting footage and audio from inside the facilities to bridge the empathy gap.

B (52:00)

Evidence.

C (52:01)

Have you gotten anything so far?

B (52:02)

We did get this inspection report that ICE's own inspectors that went in there and they documented 60 violations of this place in Fort Bliss, Texas, in El Paso, Texas. This is a government's own inspectors documenting these things. We've looked at these facilities that are relying on 911 for like medical emergencies almost on a daily basis. But as far as audio, video, we're still working on that. There has been been some like cell phone videos leaking out at some of these places that show kind of just like dozens of people in a small room that was never meant to hold people for that long. Images have a, have a power to move people and to kind of help people feel for what's going on in these places that, you know, none of the words that I write can do. So that's why I think it's important to try to figure out how to get images from them.

C (52:40)

And you feel like the kind of digital blackout space that's been created by the facility has made it harder to reach people.

B (52:46)

Yeah.

C (52:46)

As far as getting surveillance footage, I'm sure you've done foia.

B (52:50)

Yeah, we're waiting for some because the

C (52:51)

Epstein files not to bring it all the way back there. They also said there were files. It took Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie campaigning for months to get the Epstein Transparency act passed, and finally, all of a sudden, they exist. Do you think that there could be a watershed moment where you gain access to a lot of media from behind the wall?

B (53:05)

I'm hoping it's this death that we talked about earlier with this man that was killed in a detention center. I'm hoping that there's video of that. You know, we've requested it. I think just understanding what happened there, it's going to be hard to do without seeing what actually what the video looks like. I think that that could be really, really powerful if we can get our hands on something that shows that rather than just relying on people's eyewitness.

C (53:26)

Well, best of luck, man. I appreciate your time.

B (53:28)

Great. Thanks, Andrew.

C (53:28)

Yeah. Anything else you want to say to the world, the people, the children of the world, or not children, but just the viewers, some of which may be children.

B (53:35)

Nothing profound.

C (53:36)

Follow your dreams.

B (53:37)

Yeah. Follow your dreams. It's great. Thanks, man. Thanks, man.

C (53:40)

Channel 5 Live Worldwide, Hollywood and Vine, the Authority, Channel 5 News, Channel 55.

B (53:45)

We don't with custers and 5 is the best number.