Page T2From§Eachthe noon edition — 3 October 2026
As it ran on the front
The filing came out of Sacramento today: a 25 percent tax on private detention centers, aimed, the write-up says, at every ICE facility in the state and at their profits directly. Set that against the thing being taxed. A tax that lands on profit collects where there is profit, and in this industry profit moves with how many beds are full and how long they stay that way. That is how occupancy works. So the state has written itself into a business whose revenue arrives one person at a time.
Which raises the supply question. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News observed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents today as they went to arrest a man, and the piece notes the renewed scrutiny arriving a month before November's midterms. The arrest is the front of the line.…
…(cont) DHS General Counsel James Percival defended third-country removals on social media while the Supreme Court temporarily stayed a lower-court ruling, and the framing he chose was: we have two choices. A general counsel describes a dilemma. A ledger describes a turnover rate. A bed that empties toward a third country is a bed available to be billed again.
Then there is the rent. On September 30, Department of Homeland Security officials said surging deportations have brought rent down in major cities, and the Washington Examiner found economists who agree with the assessment.
So I count the books. The contractor carries the man as occupancy. Sacramento carries him as taxable profit at twenty-five cents on the dollar of it. The department carries him as a rent reduction in somebody else's city. That is four sets of books, hon, one man, and all four of them balance. The only party to this arrangement with nothing on the ledger is the man, and he is the item everyone is counting.
“Look at what just got agreed on by both sides: the feds pay to fill the cages, California takes a quarter of what the cages earn, and everybody's got a revenue line that goes up when the vans go out. And now Homeland Security is out there telling you your rent went down because somebody got taken — that's the pitch, that's them selling you a discount paid for with a guy who isn't coming home. When the state's budget and the contractor's margin both want the same thing, the guy in the bed is the product, and nobody in that room is arguing about whether there should be beds.”
“This is a tax on law enforcement facilities, which — look, I'm not saying California wants fewer arrests, I'm saying they've found a way to profit from them, which is not something I would ever say about a governor. Percival laid it out: there are two choices, and the court stayed the ruling, so the process is working, the process is being honored. Did I say profit? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
The 2026 reconciliation package put $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
Inside ICE's deportation surgeCamilo Montoya-Galvez observed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they went to arrest a man. This comes as ICE has come under renewed scrutiny, a month away from November's midterm elections.
DHS General Counsel James Percival defends third-country removals on social media as the Supreme Court temporarily stays a lower-court ruling.
As the Trump administration fights to keep deporting immigrants to countries where they have no connections, we studied the system that profits from these grave abuses. The post Inside the Business of Trump’s Third-Country Deportations appeared first on The Intercept .
Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
Newsom slaps 25% tax on private detention centers in sweeping pushback against key Trump policyGavin Newsom signed a 25% tax on private detention centers in California, targeting every ICE facility in the state and their profits directly.
· DHS claims deportations are lowering rent. Economists agree from the morgue, 30 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.