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 typically contracts with to detain people. But USA Up Star’s owner and president, a brash Marine veteran named Klay South, had been making connections. An ethics disclosure released by the US Department of Homeland Security shows the company was a consulting client of Tom Homan. A career immigration official, Homan had led ICE for a period during Trump’s first term and was expecting another immigration-related role in the event of a second. USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention, according to three people who have direct knowledge of the conversations and asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
