McKinsey's ICE Contract Redirected Toward Trump's Immigration Crackdown and Detention Cost-Cutting

Just days after Trump takes office in January 2017, he issues executive orders directing ‘all legally available resources’ to be shifted to border detention facilities and calls for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers. ICE quickly redirects McKinsey’s existing organizational transformation contract toward helping the agency execute the White House’s immigration crackdown.

The money-saving recommendations McKinsey develops make even some career ICE staff uncomfortable. McKinsey pursues ‘detention savings opportunities’ in blunt ways, encouraging ICE to adopt a ’longer-term strategy’ with ‘operational decisions to fill low cost beds before expensive beds.’ In practice, this means shunting detainees to less expensive and sometimes less safe facilities, often rural county jails with minimal oversight.

McKinsey also looks to cut costs by lowering standards at ICE detention facilities. An ICE supervisor writes in an email dated March 30, 2017 that McKinsey is ’looking for ways to cut or reduce standards because they are too costly.’ In what one former official describes as ‘heated meetings’ with McKinsey consultants, agency staff question whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justifies the potential human cost.

Sometimes McKinsey consultants are so obsessed with speeding up how quickly immigrants are deported that they make ICE agents nervous about circumventing due process rights. The consulting firm’s recommendations for cuts to spending on food for migrants, medical care, and supervision of detainees are sometimes too harsh even for ICE officials to implement. This represents corporate consulting directly enabling Trump’s cruelest immigration policies through cost-optimization frameworks that treat human beings as units to be processed more efficiently.