The Man Who Built the Cages Now Runs the Agency

David Venturella spent a decade at GEO Group. Now he's acting ICE director. For migrant communities, that's not a coincidence — it's the point.

WASHINGTON — There is a door in Washington that never stops spinning.

It is not a famous door. Nobody has put a plaque on it. No tourists photograph it. But it is the most important door in American immigration enforcement, and a man named David Venturella has walked through it so many times in the last two decades that the hinges have learned his name.

On one side of the door: the federal government, with its badges and its databases and its authority to take a human being and put them in a cage. On the other side: GEO Group, which builds the cages and bills the government by the bed, by the day, for as long as the government keeps filling them.

Venturella spent thirty-plus years mastering both sides.

He started in 1986 with the old Immigration and Naturalization Service in Chicago, working his way up through arrests and deportations and removals, climbing the ladder of a bureaucracy that measures success by how many people it puts on planes. He ran Detention and Removal Operations at IC…