The corporate enablers of the ICE crackdown

On Saturday morning, federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis. While administration officials claimed that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” video of the incident showed Pretti was holding a phone. The officers were in Minneapolis as part of a large-scale crackdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As Pretti was attempting to assist another person who had been pepper-sprayed in the face, a group of federal officers pushed him to the ground, beat him, and shot him multiple times at close range. Pretti was licensed to carry a gun, but there is no indication that he was ever holding a weapon, much less threatening the officers.

Pretti’s death was the latest in a string of horrific, violent, and fatal incidents by federal officers participating in ICE’s Minneapolis operation.

Hours after Pretti was killed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was in Washington, DC, visiting the White House for a screening of Melania, a documentary produced by First Lady Melania Trump. As Jassy and other guests entered, a military band played “Melania’s Waltz,” a song composed for the film. Guests received “glossy, commemorative black and white popcorn boxes for guests, served by gloved waiters.”

Amazon paid $59 million for the rights to the vanity project, most of which went to Melania Trump herself. According to Matt Belloni, Amazon is paying another $35 million to promote the film. Despite the massive budget, Amazon “has not shared the film with critics, and won’t before its release.”

Although Melania will almost certainly lose tens of millions of dollars for Amazon, it is a small price to pay to stay in the good graces of President Donald Trump and his administration. Amazon has billions in government contracts and provides much of the technological backbone for ICE’s surveillance and deportation activities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts the database, known as Investigative Case Management (ICM), that ICE uses to target and deport immigrants. ICM, which was created by Palantir, “integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them.” The data includes “a person’s immigration history, family relationships, personal connections, addresses, phone records, biometric traits, and other information.” Through Palantir, AWS receives millions of dollars annually from the federal government to host ICM.

Last April, the Trump administration awarded Palantir a new $30 million contract to create “ImmigrationOS,” which is “a new tool to provide [ICE] with enhanced capabilities to support deportation efforts.” ImmigrationOS is likely hosted on AWS, which has a strategic partnership with Palantir.

AWS also hosts a massive surveillance system for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The $6 billion system, known as Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), is designed to hold “personal and biometric data on over 270 million people, including 6.7 million iris scans and 1.1 billion face images.”

In a 2022 letter to Amazon, advocates argued that by “hosting DHSʼ HART database, AWS is directly facilitating the creation of an invasive biometrics database that will supercharge surveillance and deportation, risking human rights violations.” They urged Amazon to stop powering the HART database, which is still in development, but the company did not respond.

When Amazon employees urged then-CEO Jeff Bezos to terminate its relationship with ICE in 2018, Bezos defended the practice. “There aren’t other countries where everybody is trying to get in,” Bezos told WIRED. “I’d let them in if it were me. I like ‘em, I want all of them in. But this is a great country and it does need to be defended.”

On its corporate webpage, Amazon says it “support[s] our refugee and humanitarian-based immigrant population because we recognize the challenges they face in the U.S.” This is the same population being targeted in Minneapolis.

In November 2025, Amazon announced it was investing $50 billion to build out its cloud and AI services for the federal government. ICE and related agencies are in a position to provide Amazon with a return on its investment. Trump’s megabill, enacted last year, “allocated more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement.”

Amazon, which did not respond to a request for comment, is one of several consumer-facing brands with deep financial connections to ICE.

Citizens Bank

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term, the population of migrants held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has exploded — from below 40,000 in January 2025 to over 73,000 today. This has created a massive demand for private prison companies, including GEO Group and CoreCivic, to build new facilities.

Numerous financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp, pledged in 2019 to stop working with the private prison industry. (Bank of America and SunTrust have since “softened their policy statements to allow financing again for detention companies in some circumstances.”)

But Citizens Financial Group, which operates Citizens Bank, has continued to provide financing for private prison construction. In July 2025, Citizens provided a $450 million revolving credit line to GEO Group. Earlier, in March 2025, Citizens underwrote $500 million in bonds for CoreCivic