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For three years, Andrew Osborne helped his bosses promote the idea that good design could make imprisonment more humane. As a public relations specialist at DLR Group, one of the largest architecture firms in the world, he crafted campaigns for multimillion dollar projects, like the construction of a “youth campus for empowerment” in Nashville. Or the rebuild of San Quentin state prison—former home of California’s death row—into a “rehabilitation center.” It wasn’t about simply adding more windows, he argued in marketing material. Prisons could be revamped to prioritize education; jail space could be set aside to help people through mental health crises instead of booking them into the system.
“I was selling the shit out of it,” Osborne says. “I genuinely was a convert.” A 34-year-old creative type, he’d taken the job at DLR Group after earning master’s degrees in philosophy and English literature. He truly believed the design firm, which has over 30 offices and rakes in at least $500 million in annual revenue, was committed to the stated ethos of its Justice+Civic division: to pursue “healing, equity, and transformation for the individual and community” as “stewards of the built environment.”
“I think what ICE is doing is the worst thing America has probably done since the internment camps during World War II.”
So when he found out on February 4 that DLR Group held a current contract to turn an old private prison in Oklahoma into a new detention center used to hold the immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s escalated, increasingly deadly ICE operations—the sense of betrayal was instant. “I think what ICE is doing is the worst thing America has probably done since the internment camps during World War II,” he tells me, comparing the agency’s use of racial profiling in arrests to the mandatory incarceration of Japanese Americans. “It’s horrific, they’re shooting people, and here I am hating that in my heart of hearts. And it turns out my company is involved in it.”
Osborne was working from home that day, and he felt “the maddest I’ve ever been in my life.” So he picked up the phone, called his supervisor, and said he intended to quit. He gave notice two days later.
His wasn’t a lone act of protest. That week, it had become widely known among DLR Group’s 1,800-some employees that the firm had connections to ICE through its deals involving the private prison company CoreCivic. The resulting outcry has thrown DLR Group into turmoil, according to interviews with three current employees—all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation—as well as a review of posts on the firm’s internal message board and a recording of a mid-February call between executives and hundreds of workers, provided by an anonymous employee. In an emailed response to questions, senior principal and brand communications leader Andy Ernsting disputed that there has been “unrest” among DLR Group workers. “A small group of employees had questions and we had a firmwide, open dialogue about our justice work,” he wrote.
Yet amid the turmoil, on February 9, CEO Steven McKay wrote to employees that “moving forward, DLR Group will not do work—be it upgrades, modernization, or new construction—for ICE detainment or deportation facilities.” DLR Group wouldn’t walk away from its existing contract, or commit to ending its relationship with private prisons, executives communicated to employees. But it would donate the estimated $300,000 in profits from the Oklahoma job to immigration-related causes.
McKay might have been expecting the announcement to appease disgruntled workers and close the door on the controversy. But employees say the revelations about the firm’s business ties have caused them to lose faith in company leaders and thrust them into an ongoing crisis of conscience—and more are considering departing.
The uprising within DLR Group isn’t the only example of workers pushing back on their employers’ business dealings with ICE—but it may be one of the more successful ones. Since the surge of ICE enforcement in Minneapolis, more than two thousand tech workers at companies like Amazon and Microsoft have petitioned their White House-cozying CEOs to cancel ICE contracts, to no avail. A Minneapolis Hampton Inn refused to rent rooms to ICE agents, only for its parent company Hilton cut ties with the location. In March, hundreds of employees at the media and research company Thompson Reuters reportedly asked their employer to stop providing ICE with investigative software. (The company told the New York Times in a statement that it was committed to ensuring “our products and services are used in accordance with our contractual terms and applicable law.”)
But such organized pushback is rare in architecture, a “tight-knit profession” where “job security is a contradiction in terms,” says Joshua Barnett, a veteran construction project manager at the New York City Housing Authority and shop steward in his municipal union. “We’re taught to think of ourselves as arteests,” Barnett says, putting a flourish on the last syllable. “Collective action is very often anathema to how the profession is.”
The number of people in ICE custody in a given night hit a record high of 73,000 in January, up from 40,000 a year earlier.
But these are not typical times. The scale of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has produced a proportionate boom in the ICE detention system, the nationwide network of lockups that hold people waiting to see a judge or to be deported. The number of people in ICE custody in a given night hit a record high of 73,000 in January, up from 40,000 a year earlier. (Three quarters of them had never been convicted of a crime.) The agency, in search of beds and photo ops, sent detainees to Guantanamo Bay, CECOT prison in El Salvador, and Alligator Alcatraz. But the headline-grabbing measures weren’t enough to meet ICE’s demand, says Silky Shah, executive director of the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, and last summer, Congress approved $45 billion for new immigration detention centers. So, in addition to setting up immigrant tent camps and warehouses, ICE has also pursued its traditional strategy: making deals with private prison companies and local jails to hold detainees in their existing lockups.
The empty Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma, owned by the private prison company CoreCivic, was prime real estate. So, last September, ICE cut a deal with CoreCivic to hold detainees in the 2,160-bed prison, using the Oklahoma Department of Corrections as a middleman. Such deals have become a regular part of the business model for private prison companies, which are generally paid a nightly fee for each person they incarcerate. As state prison populations have fallen in recent years, these companies have looked to ICE detention to bolster their business. In 2025, CoreCivic received 35 percent of its $2.2 billion total revenue from the agency as it operated at least 19 immigration detention centers, including Diamondback, according to its annual report.
But the vacant, hulking prison needed some remodeling before it could reopen—$30 million worth of “upgrading the pumps, the security systems, the doors, the locks,” Oklahoma Department of Corrections executive director Justin Farris testified at a February budget hearing. To transform the building, CoreCivic turned to subcontractors including DLR Group, which formally signed on to the job in October. By late December, ICE was shipping detainees to Diamondback.
By early February, word of the detention center job had gotten out beyond DLR Group’s Justice+Civic division. Some workers started circulating a Google Form that gathered opinions on whether DLR Group should try to terminate the contract and avoid ICE work going forward.
In response, Justice+Civic leader Darrell Stelling posted on the company message board. “I need to address and clarify misunderstandings,” he wrote. For one thing, he emphasized, the primary contract for Diamondback was with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, not ICE. Second, the firm had accepted the Diamondback job in August, he wrote, “well before anyone understood the aggressive approach ICE would take in cities across the nation.”
“To be crystal clear,” he added, “if a contract hit my desk today for direct ICE work, we would not sign it, as ICE’s current approach to facilities conflicts with our guidelines, DLR Group’s core values and Justice+Civic ethos.”
At first, company leaders responded to Stelling’s post with praise. But soon, other workers started raising questions: How did working on ICE detention ever align with the company’s code of ethics? What had really changed between October, when DLR Group signed the Diamondback contract, and February? “I think we’re not being fully honest about the situation,” Osborne wrote in a reply to Stelling’s post. “If there was any indication that ICE would be involved, how did we arrive at the decision to move forward?”
“I was shocked that we ever signed this project,” an engineer tells me. They assume that the evolution in the firm’s thinking between October and February was largely based on fears about a changing public perception—”how negative the public reaction has been toward ICE since everything that’s happened in Minneapolis.”
Within a week, more than 75 different employees had spoken out against the Diamondback project, work on ICE detention centers, or DLR Group’s relationship with CoreCivic on the company’s message board. Some of them had surfaced more examples of DLR Group’s connections to ICE: a past contract to expand Otay Mesa, a CoreCivic-owned ICE detention center in California; renovations at a Texas ICE detention center named after a CoreCivic founder.
Reading over these examples on the message board rattled the employees who spoke with me. “By the time I got to ‘This isn’t even our first detention center,’ that’s when the cold sweat hits,” says a second engineer. “One of my greatest fears in life—and this is going to sound dramatic—but I don’t want to be one of the people in the village who said they didn’t know. This has turned me into one of those people. I am now actively profiting off making people disappear.”
“I don’t want to be one of the people in the village who said they didn’t know.”
As he read the posts, an architect says he couldn’t stop thinking about a picture taken during Trump’s first term, of a toddler sobbing at an ICE agent’s feet as her mother is detained at the border. “Picture how you were feeling, looking at that photo the first time you saw it, just having your heart ripped out through your chest,” he says. “It was like feeling that all over again.”
In his emailed statement, Ernsting emphasized that DLR Group’s Justice+Civic work is broader than ICE detention and private prisons, and focuses on rehabilitation and making conditions more humane. “We work to engage with a system that is not always equitable or just to improve conditions and outcomes,” he wrote. “This work would be abandoned, not improved, if responsible design firms walked away from the sector entirely.”
Part of the reason the revelations cut so deep, according to Osborne and the three current employees, is because DLR Group’s workers believed their company was genuinely committed to the idea that design could change the world for the better. “The major reason I pursued getting a job there aggressively is because they had a solid code of ethics,” one of the engineers tells me. Osborne says when he interviewed for his PR job, he was specifically told the company no longer worked on private prisons. (One of the engineers I spoke with said he was told the same thing.)
Other employees held the same belief—though information about DLR Group’s longstanding ties to CoreCivic wasn’t hard to find online. “I recognize that it was my responsibility to have done the research [but] it wasn’t in me to be suspicious about this,” the architect says. “I personally told myself that I have nothing morally against federal prison work, as long as it’s under the auspices of trying to improve conditions.” But for him, working for private prisons was a step too far. “I find CoreCivic to be a gigantic, insidiously evil corporation that profits off people’s misery.”
“Our detention facilities are purpose-built to ensure that our staff can care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” CoreCivic senior director of public affairs Ryan Gustin said in a statement. “CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws, or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.”
About a week after the Google Form came to light, the firm held a pair of “fireside chats” with McKay, Stelling, and the firm’s diversity, equity, and belonging leader. During one of them, Stelling said the Justice+Civic division would be “discussing” its connection to CoreCivic. “We will be having those discussions to see how that relationship might transform,” he said. “That not an easy decision with somebody that you’ve worked with for over 30 years.”
According to Ernsting, DLR Group has made an “explicit, firmwide” commitment limiting its work for private prison companies, which are obligated to act in their shareholders’ interests by maximizing profits. “We will not do work to expand the portfolio of facilities that private providers own and operate with a fiduciary interest in promoting actions that increase the use of incarceration,” he wrote.
The field of architecture has long debated the morality of prison design. In 2020, the American Institute of Architects adopted new ethics rules banning members from designing execution rooms or solitary confinement cells. “There is a spectrum within the profession,” explains Rand Lemley, an architect on the administrative committee of the Architecture Lobby, a nonprofit that pushes for better working conditions in the field. Some firms specialize in public safety design and pursue jail and prison contracts without qualms. Other architects like Lemley—himself formerly incarcerated—reject the idea of building prisons entirely. “If we imagine and believe that prisons are part of a system that should be dismantled, we shouldn’t be constructing things that 50, 75, 100 years down the road are obsolete,” he says. In the middle are those who believe they can improve outcomes for prisoners. “They focus on bringing in natural light, warmer materials, more places for activities,” Lemley says. “It sounds great, but it doesn’t ultimately challenge the system that’s in place.”
DLR Group—recently ranked by a trade publication as the country’s top “justice facility” architecture firm—has tried to walk that middle road, at least publicly. “We’ve always been a detention firm,” McKay emphasized to employees during one of the fireside chats in February. “We’ve never tried to hide that. And in fact, what we’ve always tried to do is say we can make a difference.”
He apologized for the strain employees had gone through since the Diamondback contract came to light. But now, he said, the company had made its response. “Now every individual must make their own decision as to whether they’re committed to work that the firm holistically does,” he closed the call. “I’ll leave you to think about that.”
For Osborne, the choice is already made. He says he’s speaking out because he has lost faith that management will stick to its promises to no longer work on ICE detention, especially if the firm remains willing to work with private prison companies. “Even if this is the most progressive design in history, if you give it to CoreCivic, they have no problems re-contracting their space out to ICE,” he says. He and others also want the company to overhaul how it chooses Justice+Civic projects, with more oversight and input from employees.
“Something design people always try to say—and I think they’re right—is that every single thing that happens in the country needs a building,” Osborne says. “So every time you hear about a kid being removed from his parents, somebody had to make that choice, and somebody had to produce those plans and those blueprints.”
