Trump Taps Former Private Prison Exec to Run ICE

David Venturella, who spent more than a decade as an executive at the private-prison behemoth GEO Group, will be the next acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday. Venturella will oversee Donald Trump’s mass deportation operations—and the country’s rapidly expanding immigration detention system.

Venturella will begin leading the agency when current Acting Director Todd Lyons steps down May 31. (ICE has had a series of acting directors since 2017, meaning none of them have been confirmed by the Senate.)

This has been a banner year for GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor incarcerating immigrants in the US: ICE is its single largest client.

“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history, and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well,” said GEO Group CEO George Zoley on a May 6 earnings call touting “new growth opportunities” the firm “captured in 2025 and are normalizing in 2026.”

ICE contracts drove a year in which GEO made “up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues…the largest amount of new business” the company has ever drawn in a single year, Zoley said on that call.

And with Venturella leading ICE, those contracts could get even bigger. GEO Group, Zoley said, has 6,000 “idle high-security beds that remain available.” If the company is able to fill those beds with detained immigrants, that alone “could generate in excess of $300 million in annual revenues.”

It’s not unusual for the Trump administration to hire from GEO Group’s talent bench. “Border Czar” Tom Homan—a longtime friend of Venturella’s—also contracted for GEO Group. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi worked as a lobbyist for the prison contractor.

And the pipeline goes in the other direction, too: at least six former ICE officials who left government over the past decade ended up working at GEO Group, as the Washington Post reported.

“If there was ever a classic example of the revolving door phenomena, it’s David Venturella,” who “has gone from high ranking positions at ICE to GEO Group to ICE once again,” said Silky Shah, of the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, in a statement. “Like Tom Homan, Venturella’s intimate knowledge of ICE will likely yield another spike of ICE detention facility openings in the coming months as the agency operates with impunity and unprecedented funding.”