ICE quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology. This apparatus relies heavily on private contractors. Created at the height of the federal government’s outsourcing mania, DHS employs more outside contractors than actual federal employees. Last year, these companies—which include the Geo Group and CoreCivic—spent at least $3 million on lobbying and influence peddling. To take one small example: Owners of ice’s private detention facilities were generous donors to Trump’s inauguration, contributing $500,000 for the occasion.

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Under the current administration, many of the formal restraints on ice have been removed. In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, ice increased arrests by 42 percent. Immigration enforcement has been handed over to a small clique of militant anti-immigration wonks. This group has carefully studied the apparatus it now controls. It knows that the best strategy for accomplishing its goal of driving out undocumented immigrants is quite simply the cultivation of fear. And it knows that the latent power of ICE, amassed with the tacit assent of both parties, has yet to be fully realized.

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It’s one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets; it’s another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty. But the system that Byrd helped enshrine encourages precisely that. Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ICE official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that “he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center’s beds full of inventory.”

The description of immigrants as “inventory” is a logical extension of how ice has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump’s election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.