In 2024, months before the presidential election and long before the words “Alligator Alcatraz” became shorthand for President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, a little-known company in Indiana was pitching a sure-to-be controversial idea: a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.
The company, USA Up Star LLC, had never done detention work. As a disaster-response company that mostly set up tent camps after weather emergencies, it was nothing like the multibillion-dollar private prison operators that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ...
