Corporate Contractor That Backed CIA and FBI During “Global War on Terror” Strikes Gold Expelling Migrants, Many Children, for DHS

The Trump and Biden administrations awarded MVM lavish immigration enforcement contracts, including a deal to guard detainees at a grim facility in Guantánamo Bay.

Photo of children in detention facility in McAllen, Texas taken in 2018 and provided to reporters, who were allowed in for an escorted tour but not allowed to take their own photos, by Custom and Border Protection. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Virginia-based private military company MVM once supported the CIA’s overseas operations and the FBI’s interrogation of terrorism suspects, but in recent years pivoted to pursuing business opportunities in the country’s rapidly expanding Immigration-Industrial Complex and continues to win contracts to detain, transport, and deport asylum seekers despite a track record marked by serious, recurring problems. Assignments carried out by the firm’s employees range from guarding asylum seekers at a little-known detention facility in Guantanamo Bay to installing child car seats in vehicles used during operations to deport migrant children.

Government agencies in charge of immigration enforcement have been allocated about $409 billion since 2003, according to a report released in August. That fueled a gravy train for private contractors, with MVM netting $1.3 billion from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies responsible for managing and implementing immigration laws during the last five years, federal records show.

The company was founded in 1979 by a trio of former Secret Service agents that included Dario Marquez, Jr., whose son, Kevin Marquez, is its current CEO. MVM specializes in national security, counternarcotics, and public safety programs, and has received contracts from more than 20 government agencies, including the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Pentagon. It has also lent a hand to the CIA by protecting the agency’s facilities in Iraq and to the FBI, which awarded the company a contract six years ago to conduct classified research for its “High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” which President Barack Obama established to question terrorism suspects.

MVM is deeply enmeshed in government programs aimed at cracking down on immigration into the US and has done extensive work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which operates under DHS and manages “detention and removal” operations. In 2020, MVM reportedly kept hundreds of migrant children as young as 1-year-old in hotel rooms in Arizona and Texas before they were expelled from the US. Two years earlier, the nonprofit news organization Reveal reported the company had housed unaccompanied minors in a dingy vacant office building in Phoenix that had no kitchen and few toilets. 

During the Trump and Biden administrations, MVM received five “Child Award Orders” from DHS worth a total of about $16 million that called for it to provide security guards and patrol services at the Migrant Operations Center in Guantánamo Bay, government contracting records show. The facility serves as a holding pen for refugee families and their children who are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions” until a third country accepts them for resettlement or they agree to go back to the nation they fled from to escape persecution, said a report released last month by the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Former employees and refugees held at the Migrant Operations Center – where MVM had staff from 2017 to 2024 – described it as a “dilapidated building with mold and sewage issues, where families with young children are housed alongside single adults,” the report stated. “Refugees are regularly confined to their rooms for weeks at a time [and] although the GMOC detains traumatized children, there are no educational services or pediatric psychiatric care provided to them.”

A McDonald’s on Guantánamo Bay near the Migrant Operations Center, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security with help from MVM and other private contractors. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this year, MVM was recruiting applicants with military and law enforcement experience to work as Logistics Specialists, who are assigned to a corporate command center and as field staff in operations that remove detainees from the US on chartered planes and buses. The company also had openings for Unarmed Security and Custody Officers to work at undisclosed locations overseas, where their tasks involved processing incoming migrants who’d been expelled from the US, assigning them to temporary quarters before they were sent on to their final destinations, and listening in on phone calls and screening packages “to control contraband” mailed to detainees. 

When I found those help wanted listings, I searched industry job boards and websites of other private contractors and discovered positions advertised by Texas- headquartered Acri Defense Services on a domestic “Border Transport Project” that paid $350 to $400 per day. Applicants picked by the company would be responsible for ensuring “a smooth eventless interstate journey on a road trip,” during which they would onload and offload detainees during stops along the route and keep “a running headcount of passengers using a barcode scanner.”

A review of MVM’s website this week showed the company has open positions on an ICE contract for Travel Youth Care Workers, whose duties include providing “secure and humane treatment and service to Unaccompanied Children (UC) and families while accompanying them on domestic or international flights and/or via ground transportation to facilities all over the country.” During the trips, corporate employees “use their language skills to communicate in a way that is culturally sensitive, while fostering a safe and comfortable environment,” and are responsible for ensuring “a car seat and/or booster seat is properly installed” for minors, according to the website. 

Nevertheless, sparing the rod spoils the child, so if the need for a heavier hand arises, MVM employees will wield it. In addition to “providing an orientation to the UC and/or families that...sets behavioral expectations,” corporate staff “must be able to deescalate, in both controlled and uncontrolled situations, with uncooperative individuals,” and be “capable of performing program-specific duties involving the use of force and restraints.”