If you count all the contracts for private industry from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Joe Biden took office for, that is, 2021, 2022, and 2023 " the number comes to $23.5 billion. And though you'd never guess it, given what we normally hear, that already beats Donald Trump's total for his full four years in office, $20.9 billion. Or, to put the matter in a more historical perspective, private contracts for the Biden years already top the cumulative $22.5 billion spent in border and immigration enforcement budgets from 1975 to 1997. Budgets and private-sector contracts tell an all-too-familiar story in which the border-enforcement apparatus only continues to grow ever larger, regardless of who's president. As 2023 nears its end, there have simply never been as many opportunities to make a killing (figuratively as well as literally) by surveilling, arresting, caging, and expelling people from this country. In 2023, there were 8,033 such opportunities " and I'm speaking here about contracts in play " or about 22 contracts a day. 1,421 remains of dead people were recovered along the border during Biden's first two years in office, higher in other words than the 1,133 during Trump's full four years. Imagine the national news stories, if the remains of nearly 1,500 hikers had been found in the Southwest during a two-year period. But for migrants in those ever more profitable, ever deadlier borderlands, mum's the word.