NATIONWIDE — Immigrant justice groups are raising the alarm on the rapid expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention through state, federal, and private prisons, including the reopening of facilities that have been shut down.
On Friday, a Washington Post report revealed what advocates have been calling attention to for months: with the shocking infusion of funding from the MAGA-backed megabill, ICE plans to double its detention capacity by the end of this year to detain more than 100,000 people. This followed news earlier last week that ICE will open a new immigration detention center in Hudson, Colorado at a shuttered state prison, while in Mason, Tennessee, town officials voted to reopen a former prison into an immigration detention facility, despite objections from local residents. In Florida, Governor DeSantis announced plans to use a shuttered state prison for immigration detention at Baker Correctional Facility, which has been condemned by faith leaders and community organizations.
This use of active state prisons for ICE detention is a new expansion tactic of the administration. Modeled after the agreement for the Everglades detention camp in Florida and Miami Correctional Facility in Indiana, these agreements are between ICE and a state government to expand immigration detention capacity purportedly through the use of 287(g), a federal program that deputizes local police to act as immigration agents. The use of shuttered prisons for ICE detention however, is a practice detailed in a 2023 report by Detention Watch Network and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center illustrating how jails and prisons nationwide will close for one purpose, only to reopen and incarcerate a different group of people, creating a “Carceral Carousel.” The two combined strategies of 1) utilizing active prisons and 2) reopening previously shuttered prisons for ICE custody show the deepening collaboration between state prisons, the Bureau of Prisons, and ICE to rapidly increase detention capacity and further entangle the immigration and criminal legal systems.
Communities across the country have long fought ICE’s attempts to expand the targeting and detention of people, and in the face of this administration’s unrelenting expansion of immigration detention, are demanding to shut down detention centers and halt detention expansion.
Advocates issued the following statements:
Stacy Suh, Program Director of Detention Watch Network, said:
“The Trump administration is propelling its cruel mass detention and deportation agenda to an unthinkable scope and scale. Trump’s explosive growth of immigration detention - cosigned and enabled by Congress’s megabill - is abhorrent, and is exacerbating inhumane conditions, with increasing reports of death, medical neglect, overcrowding, lack of food, and rampant transfers that cut people off from their loved ones and support networks. GEO Group, CoreCivic and other private contractors are teeming over Trump’s continued expansion of ICE detention and particularly at the prospect of cashing in on their vacant prisons. The perverse financial incentives are glaring as private prison companies rake in millions at the expense of people’s lives and communities that are forced to rely on a carceral economy. Trump’s explosive growth of immigration detention comes at the expense of all Americans as people lose health care and struggle to pay rent, and as kids go hungry. People across the country have answered by uniting to protect their family members, neighbors, and friends, demanding to shut down detention centers and halt detention expansion – it’s far past time for our elected leaders to hear us and reject the mass detention and deportation agenda.”
Jordan Garcia, Program Director at the American Friends Service Committee and facilitator with the Shut Down GEO Aurora campaign, said:
“We’ve met with dozens of community leaders, representing hundreds of concerned citizens, in rural parts of Colorado. They detest the use of their tight knit towns and communities to dehumanize immigrants. Nurses, teachers and ranchers are standing up against these corporations spreading lies and promising jobs when they know that these repurposed prisons only bring suffering and exploitation. As the deaths and abuses GEO and CoreCivic are responsible for continuing to surface, local support for these facilities shrinks every day. Our communities need investment in schools, in health care centers, and in economic growth. We believe immigrants make our communities stronger and caging people only lines the pockets of CEOs and greedy politicians.”
Lisa Sherman Luna, Executive Director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition said:
“Every Tennessean deserves to live in safety with the freedom to thrive. But yet again we see a desire from private prison companies to continue their expansion of the dangerous network of private prisons, a system that continuously puts profits over people and disproportionately targets communities of color for mass incarceration. Based on the fact that only 3 out of 7 votes from the local Board of Aldermen favored the contract, it seems clear that putting an ICE detention center in Mason, Tennessee doesn’t actually have the support of the local community. Companies like CoreCivic are multi-billion dollar corporations that prey on rural communities, promising economic growth but ultimately only prioritizing helping their executives get richer. No cruelty is ever ok on the taxpayer dime. But what's even worse is that these harms are happening at the expense of fully funding healthcare, childcare and public schools across Tennessee. This is why we have to keep organizing our communities to speak up and demand policies that actually prioritize safe neighborhoods and communities, because when we all come together we can build a Tennessee where everyone can make a better life for their family, no matter the color of their skin, their immigration status, or what is in their wallet.”
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.