Immigration Prisons as Planned in Kansas Are For Business, Not Safety
Kansas City Star: Opinion by Joshua Rush May 21, 2025
In Kansas, the average worker might hope for a $2,500 bonus at year’s end, if the company did well and the manager remembered. But under a new federal plan, a federal Immigration and an ICE agent could now receive a $40,000 bonus just for staying on the job.
That’s nearly 20 times the average year-end bonus of $2,503 received by American workers in 2024.
And it doesn’t stop there.
The same legislation proposes $45 billion to expand ICE’s detention and deportation budget by 2029, a 365% increase over current levels. The goal is to accelerate deportations and build more detention facilities.
Let’s break that down.
✔ ICE salary (for an experienced agent): $88,000 to $114,000
✔ Availability pay: Raises total to about $142,000
✔ New bonus: Add $40,000
✔ Private prison contracts to companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic, which wants to reopen a detention facility in Leavenworth for ICE: more than $1 billion
And for individuals in the system?
✔ Cost to detain one person daily: Around $150
✔ Cost to monitor someone with electronic supervision daily: $4.07
That means the government is choosing to spend nearly 40 times more to imprison someone than to monitor them.
