President Trump is aggressively following through on his campaign promise of mass detentions and deportations. Two executive orders issued on day one of Trump’s second administration made clear that detention is a centerpiece of the mass deportation plans. The orders call for the allocation of all available resources to expand immigration detention and for the detention of all non-citizens in deportation proceedings “to the fullest extent permitted.” In the following days various reports, public solicitations, and memos have demonstrated that the administration intends to at least double Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention capacity to more than 100,000 people at any given time. By the summer of 2025, reports revealed plans to add 125 new or expanded facilities to the detention system by the end of the year.

Warehouses

ICE is scouting, purchasing, and retrofitting warehouses nationwide for immigration detention, which are expected to detain between 1,500–10,000 people each. Jailing people in large-scale, makeshift detention warehouses will exponentially increase the likelihood of abuse and death in ICE custody, which is tragically already at an all-time high under the Trump administration. Detention warehouses will also divert critical resources such as water and electricity away from local communities and could cut off tax revenue and foreclose economic opportunities.

Warehouse conversions are generally being advanced for two related but distinct uses: processing centers and large-scale detention facilities. Processing centers are typically short term holding facilities where individuals are booked, may be medically screened, interviewed, and transferred within days. Large scale detention facilities, by contrast, are intended for prolonged detention of hundreds or thousands of people for extended periods. The distinction matters because facilities labeled as “processing” may be presented as temporary to justify lack of infrastructure. In practice, both models expand immigration detention capacity, normalize confinement in industrial warehouse settings, and increase the federal government's ability to detain immigrants at a mass scale.

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Military Bases

In February 2025, reports emerged that DHS had sent a memo DOD outlining plans to expand ICE detention into a network of military bases across the continental United States, including bases in Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Minnesota, New York, and Florida. The centerpiece of this plan is ramping up operations at Fort Bliss in Texas to serve as a model detention and deportation hub. Ultimately the administration hopes to be able to detain up to 10,000 people at Fort Bliss, with reports indicating that this could include both single adults as well as families.

The expansion of large-scale detention facilities on military bases will exacerbate the well-documented abuse inherent to the detention system, and the secrecy and impunity with which ICE operates. It extends ICE detention, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), into other government agencies, and obscures transparency and any minimal oversight currently in place. It dangerously conflates immigrants with labels designed to dehumanize people to justify harsh treatment and further entangles a supposedly civil immigration enforcement system with militarism, harkening to some of the darkest moments in global history when people have been targeted, prosecuted and punished simply based on their place of birth, ancestry, race or religion.

Read more: analysis on ICE detention expansion to Military bases

Bureau of Prisons Facilities (BOP)

On February 6, 2025, just weeks after President Trump’s inauguration, ICE and BOP entered into a six-month agreement allowing ICE to detain up to 800 people in five BOP prisons: FDC Miami (Florida), FDC Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), FCI Atlanta (Georgia), FCI Leavenworth (Kansas), and FCI Berlin (New Hampshire). BOP facilities are federal prisons that incarcerate people in federal criminal custody, including immigrants, and this agreement opened the door for ICE to use them as additional sites for civil immigration detention.

There have already been widespread reports of inhumane conditions, including lack of appropriate food, medical neglect, prolonged isolation, and barriers to legal access, indicating that ICE is failing to meet its own minimum detention standards.

Using and recycling federal prisons for ICE detention is not new. It is a continuation of a carceral carousel, the regular cycling of prisons for use by federal, state, and local government agencies. While the population of people imprisoned in these facilities changes over time, the conditions remain the same: medical neglect, mistreatment and abuse, isolation, and lack of access to legal and community support. Today, as the Trump administration targets a growing number of people for mass deportation and the number of people in detention skyrockets, ICE has increasingly turned to current and former BOP facilities as one way to expand detention capacity. This trend signals further merging of the criminal legal and immigration detention systems, demonstrating the necessity of ending mass detention and deportation as a part of a larger struggle to end mass incarceration.

Read more: Analysis on ICE Detention Expansion to BOP Facilities

Analysis