The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE

[Opinion. Human society has deteriorated to the point when people only want to emulate mills & bills. Obviously, these Americans are not seeing this bonus as a long-term salary but as a get-rich-quick free-for-all. Money as a god... No bidding, no consultation with Congress, no public input from taxpayers. Woo-hoo! Do you want your eyes scanned into some database somewhere, easily accessible by AI, perpetually ready for the IRS or trumped-up charges?]

Even as ICE sparks rising public horror with its tactics and killings, a raft of companies that have never before worked with the federal government are signing up to work with the agency.

Assault training. Blast-resistant window film. Sniper programs. Iris scanners. With tens of billions of dollars in new funding, ICE can’t seem to spend money fast enough, and first-time contractors from across the country are getting in on the cash bonanza, offering Immigration and Customs Enforcement everything from weapons instruction to office furniture.

Rest assured, the heavy hitters in ICE’s increasingly militarized world are still getting plenty of cash. The bulk of ICE’s funding is going to the agency’s top contractors—billion-dollar private prison firms like GEO Group and CoreCivic, defense contractors like Palantir, and advisers like Deloitte. But many mom-and-pop contractors are signing up to work with ICE, as well. These first-time contractors, often with scant internet presence or public track record, offer critical tools and training to help ICE rapidly expand. Their contracts show how, even as ICE’s masked agents launch raids in American cities and public opposition skyrockets, some Americans are still looking to cash in.

Castle Hill Partners inked its first ever contract with ICE in September 2025. The company, run by husband and wife Michael Hill and Leonora Castillo, won a $2.2 million no-bid contract to customize more than two dozen ICE vehicles. ICE said that it didn’t have time to put the contract out for competitive bidding because the vehicles were going to be used by newly recruited officers, making the work “urgent.”

If his company doesn’t sign up for more ICE contracts, others surely will. The agency is currently awash with money. The One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed in July nearly tripled ICE’s budget, earmarking about $75 billion of new money for ICE through 2029. Last month, ICE boasted that it had “more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000”—a 120 percent increase in personnel in less than a year.

Not all first-time contractors are small outfits. The firm BI2 Technologies agreed in September to provide ICE access to its “iris biometric recognition technology.” The Massachusetts-based company has sold these systems to state prisons and sheriff’s offices, but there is no record of a prior federal contract. It says its mobile iris scanner “enables law enforcement agencies across the country to positively identify individuals in seconds from virtually anywhere.” The technology connects to what the company describes as the nation’s only iris biometric database, which holds highly detailed data on the eyes of millions of people, including American citizens.

The $4.6 million contract provides ICE with hundreds of iris scanners and access to the database. The agency wrote that the technology would help it “quickly and accurately identify individuals encountered during ICE operations,” with no suggestion that it would avoid using the technology on citizens.

As ICE deploys its new iris scanners, potentially wielded by officers with new assault training, driving newly decked-out ICE trucks, there are still plenty more opportunities for companies looking for a piece of the immigration agency’s largesse. Just on Friday, the agency posted a notice looking for a company to provide “armed and unarmed transportation” to sites throughout the East Coast. And regardless of how long the current partial government shutdown lasts, ICE still has access to the billions of dollars that Congress allocated last summer. Its money won’t run out anytime soon.