William Walters is fighting to hang on to a massive government contract. Since last year, Walters’ firm—Salus Worldwide Solutions—has been running a high-profile Trump administration program that offers free flights and cash to undocumented immigrants who agree to “self-deport.” And for nearly as long, Walters’ detractors and competitors have been trying to pry this work away from his firm.

The lucrative contract—worth up to $915 million—has drawn backlash on Capitol Hill following allegations that Salus won the award through a procurement process that seemed to favor the company. In response, Walters has asserted that his company’s troubles are being ginned up by rival contractors. He has taken aim at the private prison giant GEO Group and CSI Aviation, a firm that handles non-voluntary deportation flights. Those companies, Walters argues, are working to undermine Salus’ self-deportation efforts because they will make more money if migrants remain behind bars for longer periods of time, before being forcibly deported.

“GEO Group and CSI Aviation…stand to profit the most from longer detention and custodial deportation of immigrants in chains,” Walters recently charged after Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, urged the Department of Homeland Security to cancel Salus’ contract.

So far, Walters has not provided direct evidence proving his claims that these companies have “engineered” congressional or media scrutiny of Salus, although CSI Aviation and GEO Group do lobby Congress on issues related to immigration. GEO Group and CSI Aviation did not respond to multiple requests for comment; Navigators Global, a DC lobbying firm that works with both companies, did not respond to a query.

But there is little question that Salus, CSI, and GEO are fighting over portions of the Trump-era mass-deportation industry. In this growing market, people facing deportation—whether they are detained in squalid camps, forcibly flown out of the country, or agree to leave under the threat of detention—are seen as commodities.

“The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center. She noted that beyond aviation and private prison companies, firms are profiting by providing food, laundry, and varied other services to the tens of thousands of people in ICE confinement every day. “There is so much money right now in detaining people,” she said.

DHS’s self-deportation campaign has become a central pillar of the administration’s efforts to remove millions of immigrants from the country. In theory, the idea is relatively straightforward: faced with the specter of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, undocumented immigrants can choose to end their legal efforts to remain in the United States and voluntarily return to their countries of origin. Since the White House launched Project Homecoming in May of last year, the administration has used a barrage of social media posts, television appearances, and flyers in immigration courts and detention facilities to push immigrants to “leave on their own terms.”

Salus, the sole company with a federal contract to facilitate self-deportations, has taken the campaign to dozens of ICE detention centers around the country. The company’s DHS contract tasks it with supporting Project Homecoming by signing up detained people to self-deport, buying them plane tickets, processing “exit payments,” chartering flights, and delivering other services. Salus provides the “only on-site personnel dedicated to identifying and assisting with processing voluntary departure candidates,” according to a court filing.

Salus says that, compared to the harsh realities of prolonged ICE detention, its self-deportation program offers a “more humane and dignified approach to the departure of illegal aliens.” Yet some critics, including attorneys for migrants who have been approached by the company’s representatives, say the choice being offered to detainees can be coercive.

According to Emilie Raber, a senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, conditions in ICE facilities are one of the most significant factors detainees tend to weigh when deciding whether to continue pursuing their immigration cases in court or voluntarily leave the country. Those conditions can be dismal, even deadly; fatalities in ICE facilities this year are on track to exceed the number of deaths in 2004, the highest number in a year to date. The administration has often touted harsh detention as a feature, not a bug, notably in the case of Florida’s now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The implicit threat is hard to miss. “Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE warned migrants in a social media post last September. “AVOID THE JAIL CELL. AVOID THE HUMILIATION.” Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last year launched a $220 million ad campaign touting that message with images of cuffed detainees being forcibly placed on planes.

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Voluntary departures existed before Trump reentered office, but the administration’s self-deportation push has drawn concerns from some immigration attorneys who say that, in practice, it does not appear to have the same procedural guardrails as before. Dagen says it’s unclear whether self-deportation, as it now exists, always enables detainees to exercise their right to an attorney or holds ICE to the benefits, like exit payments and legal relief, that the government is promising them. “If self-deportation is asking people to give up their opportunity to go to court,” Dagen cautions, “they are also giving up the right to hear their rights and then pursue them.”

“Given that detention is inherently coercive, the best way for an individual to make an informed decision is by getting a chance to speak to an immigration attorney about the details of their specific case,” adds Whitlock of the National Immigration Law Center. “It is highly unlikely that a private government contractor, who isn’t an attorney, is acting in the best interest of someone in detention.”

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Salus’ contract quickly ran into controversy. Walters, critics noted, has cultivated MAGA ties, including an October 2024 donation to a PAC linked to Noem, who was DHS secretary when the contract was awarded. As Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported, CSI Aviation last year sued DHS in an attempt to nullify the contract, arguing that the department had conducted a “sham” competition to award this work to Salus. CSI claimed DHS actions blocked it from competing and improperly benefited Salus.

The suit turned up a government acknowledgement that, prior to awarding the contract, DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public.” According to a government court filing, a DHS official at one point observed that the department’s actions “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.” (That official ultimately concluded the department had taken sufficient steps to mitigate the problems.)

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Walters and the web of companies linked to him have faced other controversy. Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported in March on the role of Walters-connected firms in procuring luxury jets and other planes for DHS. That includes the now-infamous “Big, Beautiful Jet” that Noem and her top aide, Corey Lewandowski, flew on. The jet became a focal point of criticism of Noem during congressional hearings in March that precipitated her firing.