Breakthrough News
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Trump Is Paying Other Countries to Imprison Immigrants | w/ Ben Becker
Posted
September 4, 2026
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27:35Now PlayingThe Trump administration is quietly building a network of overseas black site immigration prisons – from El Salvador to Liberia – and paying compliant governments to disappear thousands of people arrested by ICE, often indefinitely, without charges or legal recourse, and with no way to get home from a country they've never set foot in before.
Dr. Ben Becker, editor-in-chief of Breakthrough News, joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to break down how this “deportation archipelago” system actually works – and why he says cruelty isn't a side effect, it's the whole point of Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller’s strategy. Becker traces the model via the UK back to Israel, which pioneered the playbook over a decade ago, striking secret deals to ship Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees off to Rwanda, where many were later trafficked, abused, and sold in Libyan markets. Trump just picked up the wreckage and turned it into US policy.
Becker also tackles who's profiting: GEO Group and CoreCivic now hold nearly all US ICE detainees, making money off of each prison bed and backed by a $45 billion taxpayer pipeline passed in last year's budget bill. And he breaks down the price the US is paying for all of this. Becker says Trump is shipping people off like trash instead – and by leaning exclusively on financial and military coercion, the US is shredding its own soft power in the process.
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