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 ICE. He ran Secure Communities — the program that turned local cops into immigration enforcers and a traffic stop into a deportation order. He negotiated with Cuba. He sat in on White House working groups. He was, by any measure, the consummate insider, the kind of man who gets things done quietly and never makes the evening news.
Then in 2012, he walked through the door.
GEO Group welcomed him as an executive vice president. GEO Group, which operates immigrant detention centers where detainees have described medical neglect, abuse, and the particular cruelty of indefinite confinement. GEO Group, which does not make cars or vaccines or anything a civilization requires — it makes money by holding human beings in rooms, and it pays its executives very well to make sure the government keeps sending more human beings to fill those rooms.
Venturella stayed at GEO for roughly a decade.
Then he walked back through the door.
DHS brought him back as a consultant. Then as an adviser. They handed him an ethics waiver so the standard rules restricting work involving a recent employer would not inconvenience him. They kept his name off some public leadership lists. By 2025, House Judiciary Democrats were writing letters describing him as the effective No. 2 at ICE, the man overseeing detention contracts — the very contracts that sent hundreds of millions of dollars to companies like GEO.
Let that sentence sit for a moment.
The man who left ICE to work for GEO came back to ICE to manage GEO’s contracts with ICE.
If you wrote this as fiction, an editor would send it back. Too on the nose, the editor would say. Nobody would believe it.
But this is not fiction. This is the United States government.
And now it gets worse.
In May 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Venturella would become the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The whole agency. Every arrest. Every detention. Every deportation flight. Every contract with every private prison company in the country — his to oversee. Tom Homan’s ally. The quiet operator. The man who, according to reporting summarizing the New York Times, once called the ICE Miami field office personally to make sure a woman named Amanda Ungaro was taken into custody straight from jail, before she could post bond, as — and this phrase should haunt you — “a favor for a friend of the president.”
The friend was a Trump associate in a custody dispute with Ungaro. He called Venturella. Venturella called Miami. Ungaro was detained.
That is what the power looks like when it is personalized. That is what happens when the man running the machinery has spent decades learning exactly which levers to pull, for whom, and when.
For migrant communities, this appointment is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is a message, delivered without ambiguity: the agency that can appear at a home before dawn, that can intercept someone at a courthouse, that can separate a parent from a child, is now run by a man whose career has been defined by expanding detention, by moving between government and the private industry that profits from it, and by doing favors, quietly, for the right people.
Venturella’s supporters will call him an experienced professional. They will cite his Harvard-MIT executive program. They will mention his bilateral repatriation negotiations, his diplomatic portfolio, his decades of institutional knowledge.
They are not wrong that he knows the system.
That is precisely the problem.
A man who has spent his career building a system does not dismantle it. He perfects it. He makes it run smoother, quieter, more efficiently — which, in this context, means more people detained, more contracts signed, more families torn apart with less friction and fewer headlines.
Jimmy Breslin used to say that you find the truth in the man with the broom, not the man giving the speech.
Here is the man with the broom: he came up through INS in Chicago sweeping people into removal proceedings. He swept for GEO Group for a decade, building the rooms that hold the people. He came back to sweep the contracts that paid for the rooms. And now he runs the whole building.
The door is still spinning.
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Spinning hoodlum!