Chiefs of Firms Aiding Mass Deportation Benefitted from 2017 Legislation
Chiefs of the three corporations most heavily involved in the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown have saved up to a collective $88 million from his first tax law enacted in 2017 and are due to enjoy similar savings in the future now that the law has been made permanent, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). The three companies they head have all announced huge revenue boosts from their role in the administration’s massive crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Nearly all of the personal tax savings may have been pocketed by just one CEO, Alexander Karp of data-analysis firm Palantir. Of the three companies–the other two are private prison giant CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which operates detention centers and makes surveillance equipment–Palantir is the most heavily intertwined in the Trump administration. Its co-founder and chairman of the board, billionaire Peter Thiel, is the political patron of Vice President JD Vance; and the administration’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, owns up to $250,000 of its stock.
“Immigration policy should not be dictated by private profit motives, and tax policy should not reward deportation bosses with millions of dollars in tax cuts–yet both things are true under the corrupt Trump administration,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “Handing big tax cuts to the CEOs of the firms aiding in this cruel process is outrageous. We need to restore integrity to the nation’s immigration and tax systems.”
In addition to criticism of the assistance it lends the administration’s heavy-handed immigration policies, Palantir’s personal-data-consolidation software has been characterized, even by Republicans, as a threat to all Americans’ privacy. Palantir’s chief may have collected almost all the tax savings because his compensation dwarfed that of his two fellow CEOs, being paid an astounding $3.3 billion in the first seven years after the 2017 tax plan became law.
METHODOLOGY: Public corporations regularly report the compensation of their top executives, but individual tax-return data is not made public. Actual tax savings from the lowered rates would depend on the filing status and taxable income of each taxpayer in each year. Taxable income in turn depends on deductions, credits and other adjustments to gross income. Tax savings shown here are the maximum possible.