| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today, Rachel Adams-Heard, Sophie Alexander and Fola Akinnibi write about the obscure disaster-response companies that have been angling to profit from President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans since before his reelection. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. In 2024, months before the presidential election and long before the words “Alligator Alcatraz” became shorthand for President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, a little-known company in Indiana was pitching a sure-to-be-controversial idea: a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures. The company, USA Up Star LLC, had never done detention work. As a disaster-response company that mostly set up tent camps after weather emergencies, it was nothing like the multibillion-dollar private prison operators that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically contracts with to detain people. But USA Up Star’s owner and president, a brash Marine veteran named Klay South, had been making connections. An ethics disclosure released by the US Department of Homeland Security shows the company was a consulting client of Tom Homan. A career immigration official, Homan had led ICE for a period during Trump’s first term and was expecting another immigration-related role in the event of a second. USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention, according to three people who have direct knowledge of the conversations and asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Homan is now Trump’s border czar. In that role he’s emphasized not only the expansion of detention—the administration has set a goal of more than doubling capacity, to at least 100,000 beds—but also doing it with haste. Thus, Homan has become the most important advocate for the use of makeshift tent camps for immigration detention. And an industry is now pivoting to meet the demand he and ICE have created. South wrote in response to emailed questions that he had no comment, adding “everything you wrote in there is not even remotely true.” He declined to elaborate. The company hasn’t received a contract for detention, and it’s far from certain it will: More than a dozen companies that provide tents and related support services are angling for pieces of the $45 billion that Congress has committed specifically for detention facilities. This summer alone about $1.6 billion in combined federal and state money has been awarded for tent detention camps. Under the direction of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hundreds of people were moved into a state-run camp set up in the Everglades in just eight days. In El Paso construction is underway on an Army base for a tent camp expected to open on Aug. 17. If all goes according to plan, it will be the biggest immigration detention facility in the country before the year is out. This isn’t the first time the government has used soft-sided facilities, as they’re called, for immigration-related work. Under President Joe Biden, US Customs and Border Protection used tents to create a series of processing camps on the southwest border, as did the US Department of Health and Human Services for migrant children who crossed the border without their parents. The CBP camps were meant to hold people for short periods of time, though—a maximum of 72 hours under normal circumstances—and most were shut down last spring following a drop in crossings. Because people are typically in ICE detention for longer periods, the standards are supposed to be higher. (Federal guidelines require, for example, certain people-to-bathroom ratios and beds for every detainee.) Lawyers working with people detained at the Everglades camp say it’s already failing to meet the guidelines, which the state denies.  President Trump tours the Everglades detention center, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, on July 1. Photographer: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP DHS has defended the Everglades camp and said in an email that the agency is “working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways” to meet its goals of mass deportation. The White House said in an emailed statement that Homan “has always abided by the highest ethical standards and avoids any unethical conflicts of interest.” These camps need more than just the companies that bring in and erect the tents themselves. They rely on an entire sector that specializes in building things fast. Some of these companies, like USA Up Star, operate in the wake of natural disasters, setting up temporary shelters, portable bathrooms and showers, medical stations, kitchens and dining halls. They also find people to cook, clean and provide security. Now they’re figuring out how to operate makeshift jails. People within the industry say there are ways to make soft-sided facilities meet federal standards. Many of the companies seeking contracts with ICE sell sophisticated tents that come with floors, doors, reinforced walls and climate control. But it’s dramatically more expensive, on a per-bed basis, to build and operate tent cities than to rent existing jails and prisons, as ICE typically does. For the administration, the value is in the speed. “We’re bringing beds on as quickly as possible,” Homan said outside the White House in July. “I think Governor DeSantis came up with a good model.” A federal judge recently temporarily halted construction on the Everglades facility, in response to a lawsuit challenging it on environmental grounds, though people can still be detained there. Even some of Trump’s allies have voiced concerns. “These hastily assembled facilities, staffed by non-traditional vendors and unvetted state contractors, are ripe for failure, mismanagement and corruption,” Mark Morgan, a proponent of mass deportation who served as acting CBP commissioner during the first Trump administration, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Fox News. “This isn’t cost-cutting. It’s theater. Worse, it’s dangerous.” Keep reading: Companies With No Detention Experience Want to Run Trump’s ICE Camps | 
