Trump administration using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more ICE detention beds

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: PBS News/AP

Jun 16, 2025 11:07 AM EDT


LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”

Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally. The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.

ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.

That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as “a hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.

Read more: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trump-administration-using-no-bid-contracts-boosting-big-firms-to-get-more-ice-detention-beds

[RockRaven]

1. Waste, fraud, and abuse. His favorite hobby, besides sexual assault.

[slightlv]

2. First, I'm in Leavenworth...

when even the city officials are against this, you can imagine how most of the rest of us feel! And I live 3 blocks from the FedPen. It's not like we're against prisons, per se. We have more prisons than department stores in this town! And we've picketed them before, for all the good it does.

Second, and it really jacks my jaws that trump constantly uses no-bid contracts. This is so highly against regulations. There are exemptions for no-bids, but the reasons are highly delineated and if your reason doesn't match those, usually you can kiss the single source contract goodbye.

To illustrate, my coworker and I used a little program called "CoffeeCup HTML" to shortcut our coding for the War College's curriculum. $65 per copy. We fought for over a year with the Army and never let up because they wanted to force us to use DreamWeaver, which we had already demonstrated did NOT play well with the coding in the CMS... most of the time, rendering it impossible to use and forcing us to go back and hand code everything from Paragraph blocking to inserting bold or italics, and hand code our lists. The DreamWeaver was hundreds of dollars per person for us to use vs. $65 for a little program already government okayed by security. It also slowed down curriculum output because we were basically hand coding everything from scratch. THIS is how your tax dollars are misspent with single source and no-bid contracts. Our little "hissy fit" was pretty damned small in the full run of things. But We Persisted! (We were both women) And eventually won the right to use the program, which played nice with the CMS/LMS, and cost the taxpayers (and our department) a hell of lot less in monies. All that is moot with trump. He only uses single source and no contract bids... and I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bed dollars to donuts he's taking his cut right off the top of all that waste, fraud, and abuse he's responsible for!

[BumRushDaShow]

3. "DreamWeaver,"

LOL That's a blast from the past!

[slightlv]

4. Tell me about it!

Do you remember the main word processing program that was pushed aside by WordPerfect, later for WP to be pushed aside by MS Word? The original was called Word Plus. Oh, gods... am I old! (LOL) I remember a WANG HD that took up 1/4 of a warehouse floor!