Chuck Darwin
Over the past six months, per federal procurement records reviewed by The Lever,
a variety of shadowy private security and weapons firms have been tapped to provide firearms and combat training to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) snipers and special response teams
— several of which had never before received any federal contracts.
#Jonathan #Ross, the ICE agent who killed 37-year-old legal observer #Renee #Good in Minnesota last week,
was a 10-year veteran of an ICE "special response team",
the agency’s equivalent of a SWAT team.
Good’s killing has sparked nationwide unrest and scrutiny of ICE’s increasingly violent tactics.
The firms that have won valuable contracts under the Trump administration to train officers like Ross
include a Texas armed security company,
a politically connected sniper firm in Florida,
and a shadowy tactical training company in Virginia.
One, #Target #Down #Group, is owned by the brother of Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), as Wired reported in September.
These firms are among the many private entities
-- alongside private prison companies and social media surveillance firms
-- lining up for their cut of the Trump administration’s #deportation #spending #blitz,
💥which nearly tripled ICE’s annual budget with the enactment of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill in July.
💥ICE’s workforce has ballooned by 120 percent sinceDonald Trump’s inauguration
amid an unprecedented hiring frenzy.
🆘 The agency has slashed its training requirements and loosened hiring standards to hire as many new recruits as possible.
The new contracts with little-known companies that advertise training in
“advanced techniques once exclusive to military protection units,”
are another window into the ongoing ❌militarization of ICE,
a subagency of the Department of Homeland Security.
ICE has long deployed tanks and specialized tactical units in the course of immigration enforcement.
But the agency is now spending more than ever before on munitions and military equipment to outfit its officers.
The consequences of this spending spree, in the view of many people who have taken to the streets in Minneapolis and around the country,
were seen in the killing of Good
and, a day later, the shooting of two people during a traffic stop by ICE.
A Bloomberg report last month found that ICE spent nearly
$140 million on weapons and ammunition in the final weeks of the 2025 fiscal year,
buying from some vendors that had previously worked primarily with the Pentagon.
(A single vendor, #Lionheart #Alliance, received a $49 million contract last month to provide tactical gear like ballistic helmets to ICE.)
Most new ICE recruits go through several weeks of routine training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia.
Five hours away at the Fort Benning U.S. Army base, near Columbus,
ICE conducts more specialized tactical training for its elite units.
As ICE’s special response teams have expanded, so has its programming at the military base.
ICE also rents firing ranges around the country for its agents;
ICE spends the second-highest amount of money on gun-range contracts in Minnesota, behind Texas.
ICE’s training methods at Fort Benning have come under scrutiny before.
In 2019, under the first Trump administration, the agency inked a contract with military contractor #Strategic #Operations, #Inc.
to build out its “tactical operations complex” at the military base,
including a “hyper realistic” replica of a home in Arizona
and an apartment complex in Chicago in order to train its agents for supposed “#urban #warfare.”
Strategic Operations, Inc. received a subsequent $975,000 contract from ICE in 2024
for another
“modular training structure” at
#Fort #Benning, procurement records show.
https://www.levernews.com/shadow-contractors-are-training-ices-attack-teams/
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