The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand
Assault training. Blast-resistant window film. Sniper programs. Iris scanners. With tens of billions of dollars in new funding, ICE can’t seem to spend money fast enough, and first-time contractors from across the country are getting in on the cash bonanza, offering Immigration and Customs Enforcement everything from weapons instruction to office furniture.
Rest assured, the heavy hitters in ICE’s increasingly militarized world are still getting plenty of cash. The bulk of ICE’s funding is going to the agency’s top contractors—billion-dollar private prison firms like GEO Group and CoreCivic, defense contractors like Palantir, and advisers like Deloitte. But many mom-and-pop contractors are signing up to work with ICE, as well. These first-time contractors, often with scant internet presence or public track record, offer critical tools and training to help ICE rapidly expand. Their contracts show how, even as ICE’s masked agents launch raids in American cities and public opposition skyrockets, some Americans are still looking to cash in.
Castle Hill Partners inked its first ever contract with ICE in September 2025. The company, run by husband and wife Michael Hill and Leonora Castillo, won a $2.2 million no-bid contract to customize more than two dozen ICE vehicles. ICE said that it didn’t have time to put the contract out for competitive bidding because the vehicles were going to be used by newly recruited officers, making the work “urgent.”
“The unusual and compelling urgency is driven by the immediate need to equip and deploy newly recruited officers,” the agency wrote, adding that officers would have to remain “idle” if not for Castle Hill’s work.
The company does not do the customization itself. In an interview with The New Republic, Hill said that his expertise is in contract management—something like match-matching. “People who would like to do something but can’t, and people who want to have something done but can’t,” he said, “I can put things together.”
The couple seem like an odd choice for a contract involving ICE vehicles. Besides never having signed a federal contract before, they have no apparent experience with vehicle customization, and their recent ventures seem to be focused on real estate investments. In a YouTube video, they sat for an interview offering advice for aspiring investors. Although they both seem to be conservative, sharing pro-Trump and anti-liberal memes online, neither appears to be a major political donor, according to public records. Hill said a lawyer had advised them not to speak publicly about the contract.
But the public attention tied to becoming an ICE contractor may be dissuading the couple from seeking more federal work. Hill said he was not sure he would want another federal contract. He has been feeling “uncomfortable,” he said, from “being the focus of a lot of attention. I’m a very private person.”
If his company doesn’t sign up for more ICE contracts, others surely will. The agency is currently awash with money. The One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed in July nearly tripled ICE’s budget, earmarking about $75 billion of new money for ICE through 2029. Last month, ICE boasted that it had “more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000”—a 120 percent increase in personnel in less than a year.
Many of the first-time contractors are offering training. Reticence Group, a small company based in Texas, agreed in July to give “specialized pistol and rifle” training to ICE officials in a $23,000 deal. Its Instagram account says it offers training that “pushes limits.” The company’s website is no longer online, and its phone number is disconnected.
Public records show the company is owned by Brian Stahl, a longtime police officer who is now running in the Republican primary in Texas’s 6th congressional district. In a recent podcast appearance, Stahl expressed a complex view of ICE’s deportation campaign. While he said that he believed ICE was targeting “violent illegal criminals”—which ICE’s own data shows is not true, as more than 60 percent of the people detained by ICE last year had no criminal history—he also said the country needs to make it easier for law-abiding immigrants to become citizens. “They are productive members of this country, they pay taxes, they haven’t had any run-ins with law enforcement,” he said. “There has to be a way for us to figure out how we can streamline that process for them.”
The Reticence Group and Stahl’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Another first-time contractor, Target Down Group, was awarded $30,000 in September to provide sniper training to ICE’s Special Response Teams. It was an SRT agent, Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last month. Target Down Group’s president is Dan LaLota, retired Marine and self-described “scout sniper instructor,” who is also the brother of Nick LaLota, the Republican congressman from New York. Dan LaLota told Wired, which first reported on this contract, that his brother had nothing to do with the contract and that he was “not at liberty to discuss what business I have with a stranger like yourself.” He did not respond to The New Republic’s requests for comment.
ICE also awarded a no-bid contract to Path Consulting, a firm with no apparent web presence or prior federal contracts. It won its $35,000 contract to give ICE “dynamic target assault training.” In its justification for the contract, the agency said the five-day training would involve live fire and close-quarters combat, and the firm would help develop new “standard operating procedures.”
ICE claimed in a document discussing the no-bid contract that it had worked with Path Consulting before. Federal databases do not show any prior contract between the two. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) But it is possible that the firm previously subcontracted with some other company. That was the case with Office Concepts Arizona, an office furniture company that notched its first contract with ICE in August, providing cubicles and other furniture for an agency office in Phoenix. Its $24,000 agreement was the first time the company signed a contract with the federal government. But Office Concepts has sold furniture to numerous federal agencies as a subcontractor, according to the company’s owner, Amber Davis. That’s why its name did not appear on the federal contracts, despite having prior experience with federal agencies.
The office furniture contract highlights that, in its rapid expansion, ICE’s needs include the quotidian as well as the combative. Fulcrum Contracting, a small Texas-based firm run by the husband-and-wife team Jorge and Alejandra Jaramillo, recently accepted a $209,000 contract to install a generator at ICE’s El Paso Service Processing Center, where the agency holds hundreds of immigrants. Elsewhere, in Arizona, the company American Defense Structures was paid $81,000 to install security film on the windows of an ICE building. The company’s website says that its window film can “prevent breaking, smashing, blast damage” and is bullet-resistant.
Not all first-time contractors are small outfits. The firm BI2 Technologies agreed in September to provide ICE access to its “iris biometric recognition technology.” The Massachusetts-based company has sold these systems to state prisons and sheriff’s offices, but there is no record of a prior federal contract. It says its mobile iris scanner “enables law enforcement agencies across the country to positively identify individuals in seconds from virtually anywhere.” The technology connects to what the company describes as the nation’s only iris biometric database, which holds highly detailed data on the eyes of millions of people, including American citizens.
The $4.6 million contract provides ICE with hundreds of iris scanners and access to the database. The agency wrote that the technology would help it “quickly and accurately identify individuals encountered during ICE operations,” with no suggestion that it would avoid using the technology on citizens.
As ICE deploys its new iris scanners, potentially wielded by officers with new assault training, driving newly decked-out ICE trucks, there are still plenty more opportunities for companies looking for a piece of the immigration agency’s largesse. Just on Friday, the agency posted a notice looking for a company to provide “armed and unarmed transportation” to sites throughout the East Coast. And regardless of how long the current partial government shutdown lasts, ICE still has access to the billions of dollars that Congress allocated last summer. Its money won’t run out anytime soon.