David Venturella sold the stock. The conflict did not leave with it.
Venturella divested his GEO Group shares and recused himself from “all contracts and obligations related to detention” involving the private prison company. He told Sen. Elizabeth Warren that he had complied with all ethics requirements. Those steps matter. They do not settle the question Warren raised: whether an official can be barred from a specific contract while still helping shape the policies, directives, and guidance that make such contracts valuable.
Venturella worked for GEO Group from 2012 to 2023 and then consulted for the company through Jan. 31, 2025. In June, he became acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after serving as a top adviser to the previous acting director. As Main Street Independent previously reported, his appointment placed a former private-prison executive inside the agency responsible for immigration detention.
That history does not prove that Venturella personally controls ICE contracting. The public record does not establish that he ran GEO Group or that he personally directs the company’s financial interests. It establishes something narrower and serious: he held senior government responsibility after years of employment and consulting work for a company that is now reopening facilities to house ICE detainees.
Warren’s concern is that the recusal may cover the final transaction without covering the decisions that shape the market around it. A person might be excluded from approving a particular GEO contract and still participate in broader discussions about detention capacity, facility policy, agency guidance, or the use of warehouses for detention. Those policies can affect the number of beds the government needs and the companies positioned to provide them. The final signature is not the whole decision.
That is the ethics problem. The moral problem is larger.
GEO Group is reopening prisons in New Jersey, Michigan, and Georgia for ICE detainees and has reactivated an ICE processing center in California. Congress allocated $45 billion last year to expand immigration detention. More than 65,000 adults were detained as of early July. GEO shares have risen 82% in 2026, part of the surge in private-prison stocks that followed the administration’s immigration crackdown, as our earlier coverage documented. Detention is not only a government function in this arrangement. It is a revenue stream.
The people inside those facilities are not beds, capacity, or inventory. They are human beings held under government power. They have bodies that can be searched, confined, injured, neglected, and separated from family. They have names, work histories, children, parents, illnesses, fears, and legal claims. A company can count the beds. An agency can count the detainees. Neither count captures the human being who pays the price.
This is where the ethics paperwork meets Catholic Social Teaching. Fratelli Tutti rejects a politics that treats some people as less worthy or less human because of their origin. Pacem in Terris says that citizenship in one state does not remove a person from the human family. The question is not whether officials may follow ethics rules. They must. The question is whether the rules are wide enough to protect the people whose confinement creates the profit.
In the tradition I claim, institutions can participate in sin even when responsibility is distributed across forms, contracts, agencies, and companies. That does not erase individual responsibility. It clarifies it. Venturella’s documented employment history creates a reason for strict disclosure and broad recusal. GEO’s detention business creates a reason to question a system that rewards more confinement. The bipartisan history of immigration enforcement creates a reason to reject the comforting fiction that one administration invented this machinery.
The laws that made millions of people deportable were built across presidencies and parties. Detention expanded under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Churches, civic groups, and ordinary citizens have lived beside this system for decades while treating its victims as distant abstractions. I do not stand outside that failure. The climate of fear, distance, and administrative indifference was built with the permission of communities that often knew better.
But complicity does not erase agency. A broad system can be bipartisan and still place a particular duty on the person holding a particular office. Venturella did not create every detention contract or every immigration law. He is nevertheless responsible for making his own role transparent and for refusing any arrangement in which his former employer can benefit from decisions he helps shape.
He should answer Warren’s questions: When did he sell the GEO stock? Does he own shares in CoreCivic or another detention contractor? What matters may he still influence? What records define the scope of his recusal? ICE should disclose the relevant contracting and ethics records. Public compliance requires more than a private assurance that every requirement was met.
Disclosure is necessary. It is not justice.
A humane immigration policy would make detention the least restrictive tool available, protect due process, preserve family unity, and refuse to treat confinement as an industry. The positive duty is not simply to manage private detention more cleanly. It is to build a system in which a person’s suffering cannot become a company’s incentive.
Jesus said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He also said that what we do to the least protected, we do to him. The detainee’s body is where this argument must end: not in a form, not in a stock chart, not in a contract, but in the person held inside the cage.
Romero’s command remains short enough to understand: cese la represión—stop the repression. Venturella can widen the recusal, disclose the records, and refuse to help turn confinement into a market. The door of return is open. The people inside the cells are still waiting for the government to see them.