Scripps News investigation revealed Trump's disclosed stock trades in Axon and other companies awarded immigration contracts

On August 5, 2026, Scripps News' "ICE Inc." investigation reported that President Trump's 2025 annual financial disclosure -- a 927-page filing received by the Office of Government Ethics on June 29, 2026 -- showed 24 trades totaling $1.26 million in Axon Enterprise stock in Trump's investment accounts, dated January 29 through December 17, 2025 (18 purchases and 6 sales), according to the disclosure itself. Axon is the dominant U.S. supplier of Tasers and police body cameras. Days after ICE agents fatally shot two immigrants in separate encounters -- Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7, 2026, and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13, 2026 -- the Department of Homeland Security awarded Axon two body-camera contracts totaling more than $30 million (a $17.8 million award and a $13.1 million award) on July 17, 2026, according to federal contracting records reviewed by Scripps News and NOTUS. DHS had separately spent $5.1 million on Axon body cameras in March 2025, within the same year Trump was actively trading the stock.

The same disclosure listed trades in other companies holding immigration-enforcement contracts: 14 trades worth up to $625,000 in The GEO Group, which operates ICE detention facilities and reported record new business in 2025; smaller investments in CoreCivic and in Amentum Holdings, which holds the contract to run the Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas; and 47 trades worth up to $4.1 million in Palantir Technologies, software used in ICE investigations and Trump's largest disclosed holding among the companies Scripps identified. Presidents are statutorily exempt from the conflict-of-interest law barring most federal officials from trading in businesses their work affects. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight told Scripps that Trump is "invested in companies that he can have an impact on, because of the policies that he implements," while his administration simultaneously "hand[s] out federal contracts" that move those same companies' profits.

The White House said Trump's investments are managed by independent, third-party financial institutions rather than the president personally. "I purposely never speak to any of the people that run the money," Trump told reporters on July 1, 2026, when asked about profiting from the presidency. CoreCivic said it has no advance knowledge of or control over who buys or sells its publicly traded stock.

Trump's own financial disclosures have repeatedly shown him personally holding stock in companies whose value his administration's own contracting or regulatory decisions affected, including a February 2026 Axon purchase disclosed ahead of a separate $220 million ICE Taser solicitation. Because the Axon trades recorded here were legally disclosed rather than concealed, the abuse this archive records is not concealment but the underlying conflict itself: a sitting president personally profiting from companies his own administration funds.