Trump administration using no-bid contracts, boosting big firms, to get more ICE detention beds

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: PBS News/AP

Jun 16, 2025 11:07 AM EDT


LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”

Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally. The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.

ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.

That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as “a hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.

Read more: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trump-administration-using-no-bid-contracts-boosting-big-firms-to-get-more-ice-detention-beds

[RockRaven]

1. Waste, fraud, and abuse. His favorite hobby, besides sexual assault.

[slightlv]

2. First, I'm in Leavenworth...

when even the city officials are against this, you can imagine how most of the rest of us feel! And I live 3 blocks from the FedPen. It's not like we're against prisons, per se. We have more prisons than department stores in this town! And we've picketed them before, for all the good it does.

Second, and it really jacks my jaws that trump constantly uses no-bid contracts. This is so highly against regulations. There are exemptions for no-bids, but the reasons are highly delineated and if your reason doesn't match those, usually you can kiss the single source contract goodbye.

To illustrate, my coworker and I used a little program called "CoffeeCup HTML" to shortcut our coding for the War College's curriculum. $65 per copy. We fought for over a year with the Army and never let up because they wanted to force us to use DreamWeaver, which we had already demonstrated did NOT play well with the coding in the CMS... most of the time, rendering it impossible to use and forcing us to go back and hand code everything from Paragraph blocking to inserting bold or italics, and hand code our lists. The DreamWeaver was hundreds of dollars per person for us to use vs. $65 for a little program already government okayed by security. It also slowed down curriculum output because we were basically hand coding everything from scratch. THIS is how your tax dollars are misspent with single source and no-bid contracts. Our little "hissy fit" was pretty damned small in the full run of things. But We Persisted! (We were both women) And eventually won the right to use the program, which played nice with the CMS/LMS, and cost the taxpayers (and our department) a hell of lot less in monies. All that is moot with trump. He only uses single source and no contract bids... and I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bed dollars to donuts he's taking his cut right off the top of all that waste, fraud, and abuse he's responsible for!

[BumRushDaShow]

3. "DreamWeaver,"

LOL That's a blast from the past!

[slightlv]

4. Tell me about it!

Do you remember the main word processing program that was pushed aside by WordPerfect, later for WP to be pushed aside by MS Word? The original was called Word Plus. Oh, gods... am I old! (LOL) I remember a WANG HD that took up 1/4 of a warehouse floor!

[BumRushDaShow]

5. I also remember using Lotus 1-2-3

(and eventually Quattro Pro before Excel)

[slightlv]

6. And harvard graphics b4 powerpoint!

[BumRushDaShow]

7. BWAH!

And Paradox before Access.

I still liked WordPerfect. I worked the "reveal codes" to death and that got me into the habit of being able to use "formatting tags" like we see on forums including here.

I remember when HHS mandated all its agencies go to MS products (I guess because of a big department-wide enterprise license) but we still had to keep a copy of WordPerfect around because DOJ was still using that for their legal templates.

[slightlv]

8. In my early career, I did a tech thing that got me the job I wanted...

the first was in Austin in the early 80's. I worked for a major Publisher on Pre-K text (I was hired on as an editor), but when I saw everyone trying to work their computers with just two floppy drives, I created a "boot disk" that incorporated the necessary files for WordPerfect basic functions. That way, they didn't have to switch out disks so often. I was made the unofficial guru of the office! (LOL)

The next was a network job I really wanted at a large public library. I was observant enough to see they were having major problems with virus on their public computers (of course). After my interview with them, I went back home and created a boot disk that automatically used my most trusted anti-vir program on my BBS, and had it set to scan and remove virus, then reboot and run a 2nd scan, just to be sure. I also showed them how they could make their computers run more efficiently and faster if they simply changed the order in which they were loading drivers in with the main .bat file.

I mean, come on... even then, these things were simple, easy things to do. But it was at a time when knowledge of what to do and how to do it was fun and even more fun when you shared it others. Man, do I miss those days!!!

But I said often and loudly back then... and still do today... I HATE printers! I remember all the damned dip switches on the back of those dot matrix printers. They drove me absolutely bonkers! (LOL)

[BumRushDaShow]

9. What you mention about the floppy virus scanning disk

we had to do that at work when our machines got hit with that "Stoned" virus! Had the batch file loaded and went from machine to machine.

And agree about those 9-pin dot matrix (and replacing the ribbons on them). But then we also had those (loud) Dec line printers too for our mini-Vax.